Involuntarily I clinch my hands.
"You little coward!" I exclaim, "it is you who should be brought down! You are too mean to live."
He laughs brutally, and goes on, whistling indifferently, while I pick up the dead squirrel lying at my feet.
I find myself crying, before I know it. Not alone with pity for the squirrel; something else is hurting me.
"Is this the masculine nature?" I ask some one--I don't know whom.
Perhaps it is one of those questions which are flung upward, in a blind kind of way, and which God sometimes catches and answers.
"Are they made this way? Was it meant that they should be brutal?"
I am still holding the squirrel and thinking, when I hear my name, and turning see my neighbor over the way, Mrs. Purblind's brother, standing near me.
"Good morning, Mr. Chance," I say, rather coldly.
All men are hateful to me at that moment; to my mind they all have that boy's nature, though they keep it under cover until they know you well, or have you in their power.
"The little fellow is dead, I suppose," he said.
"Yes," I answer with a sob which I turn away to conceal. I don't wish to excite his mirth. Of course he would only see something laughable in my grief, and he couldn't dream what I am thinking about.
"You mustn't be too hard on the boy, Miss Leigh," he says quietly; "it was a brutal act, but that same aggressiveness will one day give him power to battle in life against difficulties and temptations as well. It will make him able to protect those whom a kind Providence may put in his charge. Just now he doesn't know what to do with the force, and evidently has not had good teaching. I'm sorry he did this; it hurts me to see an innocent creature harmed, and still more I am sorry because it has hurt you."
He is standing near me now, and as I raise my eyes, I find him looking at me with a sweet earnestness, that wins me not only to forgive him for being a man, but to feel that perhaps men are noble, after all.
His look and tone linger with me long after he has gone, as a cadence of music may vibrate through the soul when both musician and instrument are mute.
The day after this of which I have been telling, I went to a picnic gotten up by Mrs. Purblind, for the entertainment and delectation of Mr. Purblind's cousin, now visiting her, a frivolous young thing, between whom and myself there was not even the weather in common, for she would label "simply horrid" a lovely gray day, containing all sorts of possibilities for the imagination behind its mists and clouds.