The Fighting Shepherdess

"I presume you miss your--uncle." There was a constraint in Mrs. Toomey's voice and manner which Kate was too engrossed and wretched to notice.

She put her hand to her throat as though to lessen the ache there.

"I can't tell you how much. And remorse--it's like a knife turning, turning--his eyes with the pain and astonishment in them when I struck at him so viciously in my temper; they haunt me. It's terrible."

Mrs. Toomey fidgeted.

Kate went on as though she found relief in talking. Her voice sounded thick, somehow, and lifeless with suffering.

"I have such a feeling of heaviness, of oppression"--she laid her hand upon her heart--"I can't describe it. If I were superstitious I'd say it was a premonition."

"Of what, for instance?" Mrs. Toomey looked frightened.

Kate shook her head.

"I don't know. The thought keeps coming that, bad as things have been, there are worse ahead of me--unhappiness--more unhappiness--like a preparation for something."

Distinctly impressed, Mrs. Toomey exclaimed inanely: "Oh, my! Do you think so?" Was she going to get "mixed up" in something, she wondered.

"I have a dread of the future--a shrinking such as a blind person might have from a danger he feels but cannot see. Your friendship is the only bright spot in the blackness--it's a peak, with the sun shining on it!" Kate's eyes filled with quick tears. They were swimming as she raised them and looked at Mrs. Toomey.

"I'm glad you feel that way," Mrs. Toomey murmured.

Something in the tone arrested Kate's attention, an unconvincing, insincere note in it. She fixed her eyes upon her face searchingly, then she crossed the room swiftly and dropped upon her knees beside her. Taking one of her thin hands between both of hers she said, pleadingly: "You will be my friend, won't you? You won't go back on me, will you?" She could scarcely have begged for her life with more earnestness.

"I am very fond of you," Mrs. Toomey evaded. She did not look at her.

Kate regarded her steadily. Laying down the hand she had taken she asked quietly: "Will you tell me something truthfully, Mrs. Toomey?"

Mrs. Toomey's mind, ratlike, scuttled hither and thither, wondering what was coming.

"If I can," uneasily.

Kate laid her hand upon the older woman's shoulder and searched her face: "Is my friendship an embarrassment to you?"

Mrs. Toomey squirmed.

"Tell me! The truth! You owe that to me!" Kate cried fiercely, her grip tightening on the woman's shoulder.

As Mrs. Toomey was a coward, so was she a petty liar by instinct. Her first impulse when in an uncomfortable position was to extricate herself by any plausible lie that occurred to her. But Kate's voice and manner were too compelling, her eyes too penetrating, to admit of falsifying or even evading further. Then, too, she had a wild panicky feeling that she might as well tell the truth and have it over--though it was the last thing in the world she had contemplated doing.