The next day, she took him rambling along creek-beds where she had friends among the early flowers and ferns and budding things and the feathered and singing things. She was in an unusually light and gay mood, and chattered until he felt that he was in an enchanted forest, and through her talk, which was all of birds and blossoms and woodland mysteries, he caught brief flashes of insight into herself.
"Do you know," he suddenly demanded, looking up from a mossy place where he was gathering violets, "that you are a rather wonderful sort of person?"
She stood over him, slender, and simply garbed in a blue calico dress and a blue calico sun-bonnet. Into her belt she had thrust a cluster of violets, and her eyes, which were closely akin to their petals, grew suddenly serious. The corners of her lips drooped in wistfulness.
"Am I?" she questioned gravely. It was the nearest thing to a compliment that had come her way.
"Yes," he asserted, rising to his feet. "Anywhere else in the world people would be wild about you, and here whom do you see? You know the verses, 'full many a flower was born to blush unseen.' Don't be one of them."
"How am I going to help it?" she asked him simply. He did not respond, because he was asking himself the same question. But, when that only visitor from the outside world had ridden away, the place seemed rather empty and desolate to the girl, and she sat alone in the spring woods while some voice insistently queried, "How can you help yourself?" She would marry no man who was ashamed of her people, even if such a man should come to woo her, and no man whom she would care to marry could well escape being ashamed of her people. Only one man had she ever known who seemed to feel for her a sort of reverence; to look up to her as superior to himself. That man had been very rough and wolfish in his championship—and that man had been a felon!
If some man might come who felt that way, and yet who had a living and enlightened soul; if such a man should say, "I love you—"
"Clem's gal" bent forward and pressed her fingers against her temples. "Oh, God!" she whispered.
Long ago Malolas had been taken, and the armies of Emilio Aguinaldo were giving back. Soon was to come the second and longer phase of the insurrection: that of the guerilla days. But as yet there were still occasions of battle.