"Do you want me now, Ann?" he asked me; gently as he pressed his cheek against my hair.
"If you want me, take me and help me find that dog to-morrow," I answered as I again reached out my hand and put it for the last time on the pathetic little woolly head. I couldn't hold back the sob.
"Go in the house to bed, dear, for you are completely worn out. I'll bury the lamb and look for any traces that may help us to find the savage," said Matthew as he drew me to my feet and with quiet authority led me to the back door and opened it for me. For a second I let him take me again into his strong arms, but I wilted there and I simply could not raise my lips to his. The first time I remember kissing Matthew Berry was at his own tenth birthday party, and he had dropped a handkerchief behind me that I had failed to see as all of the budding flower and chivalry of Hayesville stood in a ring in his mother's drawing-room.
"Dear old Matt," I murmured to myself as I again fell dead between the posts of the ancestral bed.
The next morning I awoke to a new world--or rather I turned straight about and went back into my own proper scheme of existence. At the crack of dawn I wakened and set my muscles for the spring from my pillows, then I stretched my arms, yawned, snuggled my cheek into those same pillows, and deliberately went to sleep, covering up my head with the old embroidered counter-pane to shut out from my ears a clarion crow from beyond my windows. When I next became conscious old Rufus' woolly head was peering anxiously into my room door, and I judged from the length of the shadows that the sun cast from the windows that it must be after ten o'clock.
"Am you sick?" he inquired with belligerent solicitude.
"No, Rufus, and I'm going back to sleep. Call me in time to have dinner with father and Uncle Cradd," I answered as I again burrowed into the pillows.
"I give that there rooster and family a bucket of feed," said Rufus begrudgingly, and he stood as if waiting to be praised for thus burying the hatchet that he had been mentally brandishing over the neck of the enemy.
I made no response, but stretched my tired limbs out between the silky old sheets and again lost consciousness.
The next time I became intelligent it was when Polly's soft arm was slid under my neck and her red lips applied to my cheek.