Part 23 (1/2)
”Well?” she asked, still scrubbing, and her hair was fallen in curls about her brow--hair thicker and brighter, though scarce longer, than my own. But Lord! The wild-rose beauty that flushed her cheeks as she laboured there! And when she at last looked up at me her eyes seemed like two grey stars, full of reflections from the golden pool.
”I have come,” said I, ”to speak most seriously.”
”What is it you wish?”
”A comrade's privilege.”
”And what may that be, sir?”
”The right to be heard; the right to be answered--and a comrade's privilege to offer aid.”
”I need no aid.”
”None living can truthfully say that,” said I pleasantly.
”Oh! Do you then require charity from this pleasant world we live in?”
”I did not offer charity to you.”
”You spoke of aid,” she said coldly.
”Lois--is there in our brief companions.h.i.+p no memory that may warrant my speaking as honestly as I speak to you?”
”I know of none, Do you?”
I had been looking at her chilled pink fingers. My ring was gone.
”A ring for a rose is my only warrant,” I said.
She continued to soap the linen and to scrub in silence. After she had finished the garment and wrung it dry, she straightened her supple figure where she was kneeling, and, turning toward me, searched in her bosom with one little, wet hand, drawing from it a faded ribbon on which my ring hung.
”Do you desire to have it of me again?” she asked, without any expression on her sun-freckled face.
”What? The ring?”
”Aye! Desire it!” I repeated, turning red. ”No more than you desire the withered bud you left beside me while I slept.”
”What bud, sir?”
”Did you not leave me a rose-bud?”
”I?”
”And a bit of silver birch-bark scratched with a knife point?”
”Now that I think of it, perhaps I may have done so--or some such thing--scarce knowing what I was about--and being sleepy. What was it that I wrote? I can not now remember--being so sleepy when I did it.”
”And that is all you thought about it, Lois?”
”How can one think when half asleep”