Page:The New Penelope.djvu/248

 now been hidden from mocking eyes? How much did he suspect? how much did he know? Her pale face and frightened eyes seemed to ask these questions of him; but not a sound escaped her lips. The imploring look, so strange upon her usually bright face, touched all that was tender in Sam's romantic nature. In another moment he would have recalled his demand, and trusted her infinitely; but in that critical moment she fainted quite away, to his mingled sorrow and alarm; and Mrs. Shaughnessy being summoned, Sam received a wordy reprimand for having no more sense than to keep a sick woman up half of the night; smarting under which undeserved censure, he retired, to think over the events of the evening.

The hour of departure from Luckydog, for Sam's coach, was four o'clock in the morning; and its driver was not a little surprised, when about to mount the box, to discover Mrs. Page waiting to take a seat beside him. After the adventure of the previous night, it was with some restraint that he addressed her; and there was wanting, also, something of his cheerful alacrity of manner, when he requested the stranger who had taken the box-seat, to yield it to a lady. The stranger's mood seemed uncongenial, for he declined to abdicate, intimating that there was room for the lady between himself and the driver, if she insisted upon an outside seat.

But Mrs. Page did not insist. She whispered Sam to open the coach-door, and quietly took a seat inside; and Sam, with a sense of irritation very unusual with him, climbed reluctantly to his place, giving the "cayuses" the lash in a way that set them off on a keen run. By the time he had gotten his team cooled down, the unusual mood had passed, and the longing returned to hear the sweet voice, and watch the bright eyes that had made his happiness on former occasions. Puzzled as he was, and pained by the evidence he possessed of her connection, in some way, with the victim of lynch-law, that seemed like a dream in the