Page:Frank Packard - Greater Love Hath No Man.djvu/175

 great commotion, making a fine pretence of threat and attack. Janet raised her eyes, looked at the petulant tribe for a moment, smiled, and went on with her reading, swinging her white sun-bonnet, which she held by the strings, gently to and fro over the side of the hammock.

Suddenly she sat quite still. A flush of colour tinged the white throat and mounted slowly to her cheeks. "Place them in a hospital, put them in jail in yellow overalls, do what you will, young Jessamy finds young Jenny"—she had come without warning upon the passage, and it startled her, frightened her as an abrupt, suggestive corollary to her own thoughts of a few moments before. And then came, quick, instantaneous, as though to complete her confusion, to put her to utter rout before she could recover her composure, those words of Harold Merton's that had angered her so that day in his wild pleading: "Your whole life, your thoughts, everything, are bound up with prison this and prison that … your love will have to find its place within those four walls."

Her face was crimson now, and she struggled impulsively from the hammock to her feet. Of course, it was not true—it was impossible. But why, oh, why, why should this thought have been thrust upon her to ring a jarring, disturbing note into her sympathy and interest for this man? It was not true—it was not true. Her eyes were on the ground — she wanted to raise them, to look across the lawn to where the whir of the lawn-mower went steadily on—to look there calmly, unemotionally, as an answer, a sort of defiant, incontrovertible denial to this mental indictment that was not hers, that