Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/238

 'Let me help you,' said Graham.

She started violently, sprang upright, and stood gazing at him in an astonishment too great for alarm.

'Let me help you,' he repeated, and he put out his hand to take the mallet as he spoke. It touched hers. With another start, as violent as the first, she drew back and the mallet fell, with a sufficiently heavy blow, on Graham's foot.

'That is a little too severe, you know,' he remarked, picking up the implement and glancing at her where she stood above him.

At his words her strange blush, pale, yet as violent in its suddenness as her start had been, flooded her face. For a moment she could hardly speak. Then she uttered: 'I am sorry. I did not mean to be so clumsy.'

'Perhaps that makes it all the more cutting,' said Graham, smiling slightly; but with no merriment. He was aware of a feeling in himself that was like cruelty, and of the dry dispassionateness that had sustained him last evening through Jill's story; and all the time he felt, rather than heard, the thrush's hard notes knocking at his heart.

He stooped and drove in the stake. 'So. Is that as you wish it? May I put your mallet in the shed for you while you tie your animal?—Thank you.' The bitter smile, the bitter voice, left her speechless.

He found, as he went round the cabin, that his foot was, indeed, unpleasantly bruised, but he held himself from limping and put the mallet in its place. When he returned, the goat was safely tethered and