SON OF THE WIND
figure on the horizon, worth nothing but a little pity, ventured to inquire.
She shrugged, shook her head, and waived the question.
He sounded her. "You don't dislike George," he said.
"George is different."
She was very clear on this point. "He hasn't a brain, you see. He feels you don't like him, and as an animal would be, he's afraid of you. But Bert doesn't like you, because he wants something." She flushed a little with anger, and Carron dropped this delicate question for another. But upon the question that involved her mother, Blanche was not cold. Hostility mixed with affection is hot. "She doesn't trust you," the girl declared with darkening eyes. "I don't expect anything of Bert, but she ought to feel as I do about you—yet she doesn't. She says things about you. It makes me feel hot, as if she had struck me, and for the moment I hate her."
But her temper could run further than that, he was to find out, when he tried to urge her one evening into the little balcony where their first tryst had been kept. She resisted, refused, pressed for a reason, shivered. "It is rotten, condemned. It may tear away from the house at any minute, even with nothing on it."
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