She closed her eyes and relaxed into his arms. “How strong he is!” she thought. “And how brave! How glad I am to see him again, to find that he’s just as I’ve been suspecting he’d be!” At this a little color came into her cheeks.
He, not dreaming what was going on in her romantic young mind, was looking down at her, trying to keep a very tender smile out of his face—she looked so like a sleeping, spoiled child, with her child’s complexion, her short upper lip, her round, aggressive little chin. Her skin was so fine that he could see the blood pulsing through the delicate tracery of the veins in her cheek.
“Now I’ll try,” she said, after a few seconds. He let her feet down, but still held her about the shoulders. He led her to a fallen tree, and they sat, she leaning against him, he holding her firmly in his arm. Soon she could sit alone, her elbows on her knees, her chin between her hands.
“You are an American; so you said at—at Paquin’s?”
“Yes; and so are you—almost. You look and speak and act like an American woman.”
“I had an American governess. And my father’s—second wife was an American.”
“But,” he went on, “I don’t feel like an American just now. I feel as if we both belonged here—in this wilderness—as if I had known you all the always I could remember.”
She sat up and smiled, dreamily, sympathetically, without looking at him. “I was just thinking,” she said, “I don’t even know your name, yet I feel as if I knew you as well as I have ever known any one.” She sighed. “I must go.”
She caught him looking longingly at her, and they both blushed and were embarrassed. “My name is Grafton—Frederick Grafton,” he said.
“And mine is Erica.”