“Wouldn’t you?” asked Bayard, smiling.
“No, I shouldn’t.”
She shook her head with that positiveness so charming in an attractive woman, and so repellent in an ugly one. “When they burn you at the stake you’ll swallow the fire and enjoy it. You’ll say, ‘Forgive them, for they don’t mean it, poor things.’ I should say, ‘Lord, punish them, for they ought to know better.’ That’s just the difference between us. Mother must be right. She always says I am not spiritual.”
“I don’t know but I should like to see that little boy, though,” added Helen reluctantly; “and Mari—if she had on a clean apron.”
“She doesn’t very often. But it might happen. Why, you might go over there with me—sometime—this summer, and see them?” suggested Bayard eagerly.
“So you lay the first little smoking fagot, do you?—For me, too?”
She laughed.
“God forbid!” said Bayard quickly. Helen’s voice had not been as light as her laugh; and her bright face was grave when he turned and regarded it. She gave back his gaze without evasion, now. She seemed to have grown indefinably older and gentler since she had sat there on the sand beside him. Her eyes, for the first time, now, it seemed, intentionally studied him. She took in the least detail of his changed appearance: the shabby coat, the patch on his boot, his linen worn and darned, the fading color of his hat. She remembered him as the best-dressed man in Cesarea Seminary; nothing but rude, real poverty could have so changed that fashionable and easy student into this country parson, rusting and mended and out-of-the-mode, and conscious of it to the last sense, as only the town-bred man of luxurious antecedents can be of the novel deprivation that might have been another’s native air.
“I don’t know that it is necessary to look so pale,” was all she said. “I should think you’d tan here in this glare. I do. See!”