“Will you?” she said. “Do you really mean it?—no, you were not in earnest!”
“I—why shouldn’t I be in earnest?” he says, almost to himself. “Would you like me to? I mean shall I come here to—what do you call it—Warden?” and he threw himself down again.
“Yes,” she said; “I should like you to. Yes, that would be very nice. We could sit and talk when your work was done, and I could show you all the prettiest spots, and the places where the starlings make their nests, and the fairy rings in the glades, and you could tell me all that you have seen and done. Yes,” wistfully, “that would be very nice. It is so lonely sometimes!”
“Lonely, is it?” he said. “Lonely! By George, I should think it must be! I can’t realize it! Books, it reads like a book. If I were to tell some of my friends that there was a young lady shut up in a forest, outside of which she had never been, they wouldn’t believe me. By the way—where did you go to school?”
“School? I never went to school.”
“Then how—how did you learn to read? and—it’s awfully rude of me, you know, but you speak so nicely; such grammar, and all that.”
“Do I?” she said, thoughtfully. “I didn’t know that I did. My father taught me.”
“It’s hard to believe,” he said, as if he were giving up a conundrum. “I beg your pardon. I mean that your father would have made a jolly good schoolmaster, and I must be an awful dunce, for I’ve been to Oxford, and I’ll wager I don’t know half what you do, and as to talking—I am not in it.”
“Yes, my father is very clever,” she said; “he is not like the other woodmen and burners.”
“No, if he is, they must be a learned lot,” assented Jack; “yes, I think I had better come and live here, and get him to teach me. I’m afraid he wouldn’t undertake the job.”