The girl was still silent and the horse stopped. One tense moment pulsed
through all the swamp. Then the girl, still motionless--still looking
Miss Taylor through and through--said with slow deliberateness:
"I hates you."
The teacher in Miss Taylor strove to rebuke this unconventional greeting
but the woman in her spoke first and asked almost before she knew it--
"Why?"
_Five_
ZORA
Zora, child of the swamp, was a heathen hoyden of twelve wayward,
untrained years. Slight, straight, strong, full-blooded, she had dreamed
her life away in wilful wandering through her dark and sombre kingdom
until she was one with it in all its moods; mischievous, secretive,
brooding; full of great and awful visions, steeped body and soul in
wood-lore. Her home was out of doors, the cabin of Elspeth her port of
call for talking and eating. She had not known, she had scarcely seen, a
child of her own age until Bles Alwyn had fled from her dancing in the
night, and she had searched and found him sleeping in the misty morning
light. It was to her a strange new thing to see a fellow of like years
with herself, and she gripped him to her soul in wild interest and new
curiosity. Yet this childish friendship was so new and incomprehensible
a thing to her that she did not know how to express it. At first she
pounced upon him in mirthful, almost impish glee, teasing and mocking
and half scaring him, despite his fifteen years of young manhood.
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