She returned with a white garment in her hand and real mirth now in her eyes. My toilet done, she slipped the garment over me. It fell to my feet in long folds, yet so lightly that I scarcely felt I was clothed: and she clapped her hands in dumb-show. It was one of her own night-gowns.
I glanced uneasily towards the bed. Its daintiness frightened me, used as I was to the housekeeping—coarse if clean—of Mrs. Trapp.
"Your prayers first," she whispered. "Don't you know any?" She eyed me anxiously again. "But you are a good boy? Surely you are a good boy? Don't boys say their prayers? They ought to."
Since passing out of Miss Plinlimmon's tutelage, I had sadly neglected the habit: but I knelt down obediently and in silence.
She stepped close behind me. "But you're not speaking," she murmured. "Father always says his aloud, and so do I. You mustn't pretend, if you don't really know any. I can teach you."
She knelt down beside me, and began to say the Lord's Prayer softly. I repeated it after her, sentence by sentence: and this was really shamming, for of course I knew it perfectly. At the time I felt only that she—this beautiful creature beside me—was in a strange state of exaltation which I could not in the least understand. I know now something of the springs I had touched and loosened within her—I, a naked waif coming to her out of the night and catching her hand for protection. It was not I she taught, nor over me that she yearned. She was reaching through me to a child unknown, using me to press against a strange love tearing at the roots of her body, and to break the pain of it—the roots of her body, I say; for he who can separate a woman's soul from her body is a wiser man than I.
She rose from her knees; threw back the sheets and tucked them about me as I snuggled down.
"What is your name?"
"Harry Revel. Are you Miss Isabel Brooks?"
"I am Isabel."