I grieve to say
that her parents had taken advantage of this publicity and his supposed
helpless condition to show their disgust of his assumption, to the
extreme of making faces at him--an act which he resented with such a
furious glare that they retreated hurriedly to their own veranda. A
fresh though somewhat inconsistent grievance was added to their previous
indictment of him: "If we ain't found dead in our bed with our throats
cut by that woman's crazy husband" (they had settled by this time that
there had been a clandestine marriage), "we'll be lucky," groaned Mrs.
Forsyth.
Meantime, the mountain summer waxed to its fullness of fire and
fruition. There were days when the crowded forest seemed choked and
impeded with its own foliage, and pungent and stifling with its own
rank maturity; when the long hillside ranks of wild oats, thickset and
impassable, filled the air with the heated dust of germination. In this
quickening irritation of life it would be strange if the unfortunate
man's torpid intellect was not helped in its awakening, and he was
allowed to ramble at will over the ranch; but with the instinct of a
domestic animal he always returned to the house, and sat in the porch,
where Josephine usually found him awaiting her when she herself returned
from a visit to the mill.
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