“And now what are your thoughts?” said I.
“I was just wanting to be a man, that's all.” And Peg stared straight ahead as though in a muse. Then starting up, and with a rush of vivacity: “Heigh ho! and now if I were, I'll wager I'd be as dull as the others—as dull as you, watch-dog.” Then, changing the tune of it, but keeping to her dash and fling: “So you would be my slave! Come, let me mark you for my slave!”
Without warning, she seized my hand, and with her sharp leopard teeth bit until the blood flowed. Then surveying her work, she kissed the pin-prick of a wound with unction. When she raised her face, there was a trickle of blood on her lip and chin.
Walking to a mirror with a careless, flinging step, Peg glanced her face over, and I thought with relish.
“See if there do not come a pretty white mark when it heals.” This she told me in an arch manner, and with chin on shoulder, and the fleck of blood on her chin. “Now if I but dared,” she went on, returning to the glass, “I would wear that blood always and never wash it away. But the world! the world!—ah, the world! One must wash one's face for the world although one owes the world nothing.”
Peg, now in a climax of bubbling spirits, and pouring a spoonful of water on her handkerchief, washed off the spots of red, transferring them to her tiny square of cambric. This she contemplated with a sort of surprised delight, as tendering a new idea.
“I need never wash that, at any rate,” said she. Then with her glancing eyes on me: “You will wear my mark now;—Peg's mark for her slave!—who would do her good.”
The next moment she went singing across the lawn for her home, leaving me to think on the caprices of our radiant, reckless, blooming, madcap Peg. All this by the way, however; now to return to our day of the Reverend Campbell's call upon the General.
Peg was still curled in her big armchair when, following his interview with the General, the Reverend Campbell left the mansion. It was she who told his departure to me where I wrought at my desk. Peg caught a flutter of him through the large window.
“Oh!” cried Peg, “there goes our Reverend Raven.”