Malcolm flushed a trifle. He was nearly sixteen, tall and broad-shouldered, but the colour came as easily to his handsome face now as when a little fellow of ten he had begged her to keep his silver arrow "to remember him by."
"No, thanks," he answered, stiffly. There was a jealous note in his voice as he added, "And you wouldn't let me keep the little heart of gold that night after the play."
"Of co'se not! Papa Jack gave me that. I think everything of it."
"You wouldn't even lend it to me," he continued.
"Because we'd come to the end of the play. You were not Sir Feal any longah, and you didn't have any shield to bind it on, so what good would it have done?"
"But we haven't come to the end of the play," he insisted. "I've thought of you ever since as my Princess Winsome, and it has been more than a year since that night. Yesterday, when I saw your picture on the pendulum, and heard how it had influenced that girl in the cabin, I wished that I could make you understand how much more your influence means to me; and I made up my mind to ask you for something. Will you give it to me, Lloyd? It's just the tip of that little curl behind your ear. It shines like gold, and I want to put it in the back of my watch as a talisman, like they used to carry in old times, you know—a token that I am your knight, and that I may do as it says in the song, come back to you 'on some glad morrow.' I want to carry it with me always, as I shall always carry your shadow-self wherever I go."
Lloyd bent her head so far over the nuts as she chose one with great deliberation that her hair fell across the cheek nearest him, and he could not see how red her face grew. How handsome he was, she thought. How deep and clear his eyes looked as they smiled into hers. If she had never known of Ida's mistake—if she had never heard the Hildegarde story—there might have crept into her girlish fancy, young though she was, the thought that this was the love written for her in the stars. But like a flash came the recollection of old Hildgardmar's warning:
"And many youths will come to thee, each begging, 'Give me the royal mantle, Hildegarde. I am the prince the stars have destined for thee!'"
And then his words of blessing:
"Because even in childhood days thou ever kept in view the sterling yardstick as I bade thee, because no single strand of all the golden warp that Clotho gave thee was squandered on another, because thou waitedst till thy woman's fingers wrought the best that lay within thy woman's heart, all happiness shall now be thine."