Page:A Nameless Nobleman.djvu/73

Rh came, they would be like benedictions, rather than the light caresses Valerie so freely bestowed.

One of the minor crosses of Deborah Wilder's life (and she lived, so to speak, in a forest of crosses large and small) was her daughter's hair. It was so abundant in quantity, so bright in its chestnut tint, so wavy in its growth, mutinously breaking into little burnished curls on the temples, and in the nape of the columnar neck, especially after an encounter with the sweet strong wind, so often Molly's playmate, that it could neither be hidden nor disregarded; and although the girl herself seemed to take no especial thought of it, beyond brushing it smoothly behind her ears, and knotting it in a great coil at the back of her head, whence it too often slipped, and fell a great burnished serpent, almost to her heels, Deborah was always worrying lest this rare abundance and rich coloring should prove a snare, either to the child herself, or some admirer yet to appear; and more than once she would have shorn her like a lamb, but that Humphrey sternly forbade; and at last Molly took the matter into her own hands, and quietly met her mother's last proposition to shorten it, with,—

"Nay, mother, father has said he will have my hair as it is, and I shall never touch scissors to it again."

"Thee has thy father's own stubborn temper," replied Deborah angrily; but there the matter rested.

The wagon was ready and waiting; and Humphrey, stamping his feet, and drawing the muffler tight around his neck, looked dubiously toward the sea, which tossed and moaned restlessly beneath a low-hung,