Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/237

 caught, shut in a prison, at the very moment when her chance of happiness had come.

They came suddenly out of the thicket into the lane that led from Aunt Cassie's gazeboed house to Pentlands, and as they passed through the gate they saw Aunt Cassie's antiquated motor drawn up at the side of the road. The old lady was nowhere to be seen, but at the sound of hoofs the rotund form and silly face of Miss Peavey emerged from the bushes at one side, her bulging arms filled with great bunches of some weed.

She greeted Olivia and nodded to O'Hara. "I've been gathering catnip for my cats," she called out. "It grows fine and thick there in the damp ground by the spring."

Olivia smiled. . . a smile that gave her a kind of physical pain. . . and they rode on, conscious all the while that Miss Peavey's china-blue eyes were following them. She knew that Miss Peavey was too silly and innocent to suspect anything, but she would, beyond all doubt, go directly to Aunt Cassie with a detailed description of the encounter. Very little happened in Miss Peavey's life and such an encounter loomed large. Aunt Cassie would draw from her all the tiny details, such as the fact that Olivia looked as if she had been weeping.

Olivia turned to O'Hara. "There's nothing malicious about poor Miss Peavey," she said, "but she's a fool, which is far more dangerous."