The Hollow of Her Hand by McCutcheon, George Barr, 1866-1928

The one great, inexplicable mystery to her was the heart of Sara Wrandall. She could not fathom it.

She could understand her own utter subjection to the will of the other woman; she could explain it satisfactorily to herself, and she could have explained it to the world. Self-preservation in the beginning, self-surrender as time went on, self-sacrifice as the prerogative.

And so it was, on this grey spring day, that she gazed undaunted at the world, with the shadows all about her, and hummed a sprightly tune through warm red lips that were kissed by the morning mist.

She came to the bridge by the mill, long since deserted and now a thing of ruin and decay. A man in knickerbockers stood leaning against the rail, idly gazing down at the trickling stream below. The brier pipe that formed the circuit between hand and lips sent up soft blue coils to float away on the drizzle.

She passed behind him, with a single furtive, curious glance at his handsome, undisturbed profile, and in that glance recognised him as the man she had seen the day before.

When she was a dozen rods away, the tall man turned his face from the stream and sent after her the long-restrained look. There was something akin to cautiousness in that look of his, as if he were afraid that she might turn her head suddenly and catch him at it. Something began stirring in his heart, the nameless something that awakens when least expected. He felt the subtle, sweet femininity of her as she passed. It lingered with him as he looked.

She turned the bend in the road a hundred yards away. For many minutes he studied the stream below without really seeing it. Then he straightened up, knocked the ashes from his pipe, and set off slowly in her wake, although he had been walking in quite the opposite direction when he came to the bridge,--and on a mission of some consequence, too.

There was the chance that he would meet her coming back.

CHAPTER VII

A FAITHFUL CRAYON-POINT

Leslie Wrandall came out on the eleven-thirty. Hetty was at the station with the motor, a sullen resentment in her heart, but a welcoming smile on her lips. The sun shone brightly. The Sound glared with the white of reflected skies.

"I thought of catching the eight o'clock," he cried enthusiastically, as he dropped his bag beside the motor in order to reach over and shake hands with her. "That would have gotten me here hours earlier. The difficulty was that I didn't think of the eight o'clock until I awoke at nine."

"And then you had the additional task of thinking about breakfast," said Hetty, but without a trace of sarcasm in her manner.

"I never think of breakfast," said he amiably. "I merely eat it. Of course, it's a task to eat it sometimes, but--well, how are you? How do you like it out here?"

He was beside her on the broad seat, his face beaming, his gay little moustache pointing upward at the ends like oblique brown exclamation points, so expansive was his smile.