Page:A Leaf in the Storm.djvu/113

106 She was so infinitely lovely, so golden-bright, so rose-like, so dainty in hue and shape, that it seemed to me she ought to be housed as graciously as a butterfly in a lily cup, as a little blue warbler in a summer nest of leaves.

She soon espied me where I kept my vigil. She would laugh a little and glance at me with her sweet mischievous eyes, and now and then would nod her head with some charming little gesture, half of invitation, half of derision and disdain. And yet she was coy too.

She would take her way to mass in early morning, with a string of red dried berries round her throat for rosary, and would go counting them, with her white lids and her long dark eyelashes cast downward, nor look to right or left of her, seeming ever absorbed in earnest prayer.

God in heaven! who teaches women? This one had not fully spent her seventeenth year; she had been the child of poor labouring people, her father a hewer of wood, her mother a weaver of lace; she had seen naught of any world except this little one of the gray, quiet old town set on the river-rock; and yet who could have taught her any wile which she had not by nature of her sex's science! No one—not even him by whom the mother of Cain was tempted, as priests say.