"Ahuh! That must be what ails me," he muttered. "The look of her--an' that kiss--they've gone hard me. I should never have stopped to talk. An' I'm to kill her father an' leave her to God knows what."
Something was wrong somewhere. Jean absolutely forgot that within the hour he had pledged his manhood, his life to a feud which could be blotted out only in blood. If he had understood himself he would have realized that the pledge was no more thrilling and unintelligible in its possibilities than this instinct which drew him irresistibly.
"Ellen Jorth! So--my dad calls her a damned hussy! So--that explains the--the way she acted--why she never hit me when I kissed her. An' her words, so easy an' cool-like. Hussy? That means she's bad--bad! Scornful of me--maybe disappointed because my kiss was innocent! It was, I swear. An' all she said: 'Oh, I've been kissed before.'"
Jean grew furious with himself for the spreading of a new sensation in his breast that seemed now to ache. Had he become infatuated, all in a day, with this Ellen Jorth? Was he jealous of the men who had the privilege of her kisses? No! But his reply was hot with shame, with uncertainty. The thing that seemed wrong was outside of himself. A blunder was no crime. To be attracted by a pretty girl in the woods--to yield to an impulse was no disgrace, nor wrong. He had been foolish over a girl before, though not to such a rash extent. Ellen Jorth had stuck in his consciousness, and with her a sense of regret.
Then swiftly rang his father's bitter words, the revealing: "But the looks of her an' what she is--they don't gibe!" In the import of these words hid the meaning of the wrong that troubled him. Broodingly he pondered over them.
"The looks of her. Yes, she was pretty. But it didn't dawn on me at first. I--I was sort of excited. I liked to look at her, but didn't think." And now consciously her face was called up, infinitely sweet and more impelling for the deliberate memory. Flash of brown skin, smooth and clear; level gaze of dark, wide eyes, steady, bold, unseeing; red curved lips, sad and sweet; her strong, clean, fine face rose before Jean, eager and wistful one moment, softened by dreamy musing thought, and the next stormily passionate, full of hate, full of longing, but the more mysterious and beautiful.
"She looks like that, but she's bad," concluded Jean, with bitter finality. "I might have fallen in love with Ellen Jorth if--if she'd been different."