He did
not look up as he went past. The farmer returned to the porch.
The misunderstanding that was to wreck the tender relationship that had
begun to grow up between father and daughter began on that evening. Tom
Butterworth was furious. He muttered and clinched his fists. Clara's heart
beat heavily. For some reason she felt guilty, as though she had been
caught in an intrigue with the man. For a long time her father remained
silent and then he, like the farm hand, made a furious and brutal attack on
her. "Where have you been with that fellow? What you been up to?" he asked
harshly.
For a time Clara did not answer her father's question. She wanted to
scream, to strike him in the face with her fist as she had struck the man
in the shed. Then her mind struggled to take hold of the new situation. The
fact that her father had accused her of seeking the thing that had happened
made her hate John May less heartily. She had some one else to hate.
Clara did not think the matter out clearly on that first evening but, after
denying that she had ever been anywhere with John May, burst into tears and
ran into the house. In the darkness of her own room she began to think of
her father's words. For some reason she could not understand, the attack
made on her spirit seemed more terrible and unforgivable than the attack
upon her body made by the farm hand in the shed. She began to understand
vaguely that the young man had been confused by her presence on that warm
sunshiny afternoon as she had been confused by the words uttered by Jim
Priest, by the song of the bees in the orchard, by the love-making of the
birds, and by her own uncertain thoughts.
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