SON OF THE WIND
broidery of light and shadow was drawn across the ground. The chestnut greeted him coquettishly. Carron looked at her stall and manger, glanced over her own admirable appearance, whistled with surprise, told her she was a handsome girl with four good feet and asked her who had been looking out for her so early in the morning. "It couldn't have been that child," he thought. Still, with the help of a bucket upside down, a well-grown girl, of say fifteen, might manage the grooming, though hardly the stalls. "If she did," he reflected, "she knows how. She's earned some candy." He rather thought he was going to like the younger Miss Rader. As for the elder, who went to country dances, and was squired by the man on the road, probably she would share her mother's opinion, and hold a doubtful distance. Nevertheless, as he approached the house again he looked along the piazza to see if anywhere there was the flutter of a gown; and he opened the dining-room door with a slight disturbance of the nerves.
It was a small, rather long and narrow room, with worn walls and a terrible fireplace of cast iron, but it was filled with the same pleasant, greenish, watery sunlight that had lighted his room upstairs, a tone which seemed common to the whole house. The only people at table were Mrs. Rader
60
