Page:Randall Parrish--My Lady of the South.djvu/187

ON GUARD WITH JEAN know, and it is pretty hard to learn to like even one Yankee."

"But you are going to try?"

I could hear the breath between her half-opened lips.

"I don't think I shall have to try—very hard. Somehow you do not seem like a Yankee at all."

"Good; I am not going to seem like one—at least not in the sense you mean."

If I could have read the expression in her eyes I might have dared more, but, in that darkness, her words barely audible from the cautious whisper in which we conversed, my courage failed. Already I had gained much, more even than I could justly have expected, and I might make a great mistake at any attempt to go further. Besides she was in my care, she had trusted herself to me, and were I to take unfair advantage of the situation it might cost me all I had already gained of her good-will. This consideration was sufficient to induce me to speak of other things, the war, the relation of Colonel Donald to the Confederacy, and her early life in this region. I think she was glad to talk, even in a cautious whisper, as a partial relief from the strain of waiting there in uncertainty and darkness, and she spoke with a girlish frankness, affording me glimpses of her character. Yet the time came when we both relapsed into silence, and I sat motionless, listening for any sound, my eyes on the thin line of light streaming through the crack left by the nearly closed library door. I felt little apprehension of any other presence in the house, believing the girl's overwrought nerves [ 177 ]