Betty suspected that most of the platters journeyed
down the long corridor deftly perched on top of his woolly head.
She frequently detected him with greasy or sticky fingers, which
while it argued a serious breach of trust also served to indicate
his favorite dishes. These two servitors were aware that their
mistress was laboring under some unusual stress of emotion. In
its presence big Steven, who, with the slightest encouragement,
became a medium through which the odds and ends of plantation
gossip reached Betty's ears, held himself to silence; while
little Steve ceased to shift his weight from foot to foot, the
very dearth of speech fixed his attention.
The long French windows, their curtains drawn, stood open. All
day a hot September sun had beaten upon the earth, but with the
fall of twilight a soft wind had sprung up and the candles in
their sconces flared at its touch. It came out of wide solitudes
laden with the familiar night sounds. It gave Betty a sense of
vast unused spaces, of Belle Plain clinging on the edge of an
engulfing wilderness, of her own loneliness. She needed Charley
as much as he seemed to think he needed her. The life she had
been living had become suddenly impossible of continuance; that
it had ever been possible was because of Charley; she knew this
now as she had never known it before.
Her thoughts dealt with the past. In her one great grief, her
mother's death, it had been Charley who had sustained and
comforted her.
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