"Well, I reckon I will, if you're going anyway," said Cynthia at last; "and if I drive with you there'll be no use for Lila to go she can stay with mother.""But mother doesn't need me," said Lila, in answer to Jim's wistful eyes; "and it's such a lovely day--after getting up so early I don't want to stay indoors."Without a word Jim held out his band to Cynthia, and she climbed, with unbending dignity, to the driver's seat."You know you've got that dress to turn, Lila," she said, as she settled her stiff skirt primly over her knees.
"I can do it when I get home," answered Lila, laying her hand on the young man's arm and stepping upon the wheel."Where shall Isit, Jim?"
Cynthia turned and looked at her coldly.
"You'd be more comfortable in that chair at the back," she suggested, and Lila sat down obediently in the little splitbottomed chair between a brown stone jar of butter and a basket filled with new-laid eggs.The girl folded her white hands in the lap of her faded muslin and listened patiently to the pleasant condescension in Cynthia's voice as she discussed the belated planting of the crops.As the spring wagon rolled in the shade of the honey-locusts between the great tobacco fields, striped with vivid green, the June day filled the younger sister's eyes with a radiance that seemed but a reflection of its own perfect beauty.Not once did her lover turn from Cynthia to herself, but she was conscious, sitting quietly beside the great brown jar, that for him she filled the morning with her presence--that he saw her in the blue sky, in the sunny fields, and in the long red road with the delicate shadowing of the locusts.In her cramped life there had been so little room in which her dreams might wander that gradually the romantic devotion of her old playmate had grown to represent the measure of her emotional ideal.In spite of her poetic face she was in thought soundly practical, and though the plain Cynthia might send a fanciful imagination in pursuit of the impossible, to Lila the only destiny worth cherishing at heart was the one that drew its roots deep from the homely soil about her.The stern class distinctions which had always steeled Cynthia against the friendly advances of her neighbours troubled the younger sister not at all.She remembered none of the past grandeur, the old Blake power of rule, and the stories of gallant indiscretions and powdered beaux seemed to her as worthless as the moth-eaten satin rags which filled the garret.She loved the familiar country children, the making of fresh butter, and honest admiration of her beauty; and except for the colourless poverty in which they lived, she might easily have found her placid happiness on the little farm.With ambition--the bitter, agonised ambition that Cynthia felt for her--she was as unconcerned as was her blithe young lover chatting so merrily in the driver's seat.The very dullness of her imagination had saved her from the awakening that follows wasted hopes.
"The tobacco looks well," Cynthia was saying in her formal tones;"all it needs now is a rain to start it growing.You've got yours all in by now, I suppose.""Oh, yes; mine was put in before Christopher's," responded Jim, feeling instantly that the woman beside him flinched at his unconscious use of her brother's name.
"He is always late," she remarked with forced politeness, and the conversation dragged until they reached the cross-roads and she climbed into the stage.
"Be sure to hurry back," were her last words as she rumbled off;and when, in looking over her shoulder at the first curve, she saw Lila lift her beaming eyes to Jim Weatherby's face, the protest of all the dust in the old graveyard was in the groan that hovered on her lips.She herself would have crucified her happiness with her own loyal hands rather than have dishonoured by so much as an unspoken hope the high excellences inscribed upon the tombstones of those mouldered dead.
