Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/432

 glanced up sharply from her book and listened. Why, he was talking about Crittenden's—old Mr. Crittenden dead and had left that lovely old mountain home to some indifferent nephew? To make sure, she put her book down and asked a question or two. How strange that she should be talking about Ashley to people here in a Roman pension! Ashley! Crittenden's! Cousin Hetty!

She seemed to have gone again back to her book, but she was not reading. She was looking at a sunlit green valley, a white road winding through it, a glass-clear little river chanting under willows, low, friendly homes under tall elms, ugly old people with plain speech and honest, quiet eyes, smiling down lovingly on a skipping, frisking little girl.

After a time she closed her book and went up on the roof for a quiet moment alone, to go back to Ashley, to look at those blue, remembered hills.

But there was some one else on the terrazza. She made out a man's figure under the grapevine. Being a girl, she thought impatiently, she was obliged to turn back and shut herself up in her stuffy room. It continued to be exactly as it had been in Bayonne. The world was one great Jeanne, with a nose twitching for scandal. Ashley was far away!

She had watched the horrid little tragedy of the swallow with such intensity that when the catastrophe came she almost felt those curved claws sink into her own flesh … bon Dieu! What was that man doing climbing out of the window—a madman! No, he had seen the cat, too! What a leap! And now how he ran—like a prestissimo alla forte passage! Ah! He had caught that wretched cat. But the swallow was dead. He was too late! How gently he picked it up. Did men ever feel compassion for things hurt?

Oh! oh! the swallow had flown out of his hands! How it soared up and up! Who would not soar, saved by a strong, kind hand from such terror!