But to-day she was of the clearest color, a pretty girl, whose gray eyes twinkled to his in gay companionship. He marked how the sunshine was spun into the fair shadows of her hair and seemed itself to catch a lustre, rather than to impart it, and the light of the June day drifted through the gauzy hat, touching her face with a delicate and tender flush that came and went like the vibrating pink of early dawn. She had the divinest straight nose, tip-tilted the faintest, most alluring trifle, and a dimple cleft her chin, “the deadliest maelstrom in the world!” He thrilled through and through. He had been only vaguely conscious of the dimple in the night. It was not until he saw her by daylight that he really knew it was there.
The village hummed with life before them. They walked through shimmering airs, sweeter to breathe than nectar is to drink. She caught a butterfly, basking on a jimson weed, and, before she let it go, held it out to him in her hand. It was a white butterfly. He asked which was the butterfly.
“Bravo!” she said, tossing the captive craft above their heads and watching the small sails catch the breeze; “And so you can make little flatteries in the morning, too. It is another courtesy you should be having from me, if it weren't for the dustiness of it. Wait till we come to the board walk.”
She had some big, pink roses at her waist. “In the meantime,” he answered, indicating these, “I know very well a lad that would be blithe to accept a pretty token of any lady's high esteem.”
“But you have one, already, a very beautiful one.” She gave him a genial up-and-down glance from head to foot, half quizzical, but so quick he almost missed it. And then he was glad he had found the straw hat with the youthful ribbon, and all his other festal vestures. “And a very becoming flower a white rose is,” she continued, “though I am a bold girl to be blarneying with a young gentleman I met no longer ago than last night.”
“But why shouldn't you blarney with a gentleman, when you began by saving his life?”
“Or, rather, when the gentleman had the politeness to gallop about the county with me tucked under his arm?” She stood still and laughed softly, but consummately, and her eyes closed tight with the mirth of it. She had taken one of the roses from her waist, and, as she stood, holding it by the long stem, its petals lightly pressed her lips.
“You may have it—in exchange,” she said. He bent down to her, and she began to fasten the pink rose in place of the white one on his coat. She did not ask him, directly or indirectly, who had put the white one there for him, because she knew by the way it was pinned that he had done it himself. “Who is it that ev'ry morning brings me these lovely flow'rs?” she burlesqued, as he bent over her.
“'Mr. Wimby,'” he returned. “I will point him out to you. You must see him, and, also, Mr. Bodeffer, the oldest inhabitant—and crossest.”
“Will you present them to me?”