We walked through the yard and across the street arm in arm. At the door I bade her good-night, as I had a hundred times before, by raising her flower-scented hand to my lips and kissing it while pressing her fingers ever so tenderly.
It all seemed quite the usual way, Jean François. Now wouldn't that pretty well indicate that a man had some privileges? Eh?
As for the trouble, I'll tell you how it began.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE DAY OF DOUBT
For a very long time I was quite at a loss to determine whether it was the red of her hair or the lips of her large and interesting mouth which caused me to love Nance Gwyn. Even to this day, as a lover of long standing, I am not always certain that I know the whys and wherefores of such an inconsistent mixture of passion and tenderness. There have been moments, such as when a wild whisp of it would come taunting my face with its soft caresses, or when my hands inadvertently must need touch it for a seemingly timeless instant, that I was very sure, as sure as I knew for some reason I loved her with all of my life, that it was her hair. Of one thing I have always been confident: I could never have loved a woman whose hair was other than the color of Nance's.
Of course there were times when I thought it was for other things than the hair and the lips. Her feet, for example, when I came upon her wading in the Middleton's brook. This hurrying little stream ran through the heart of a small woodland pasture near town. It was in a leafy hollow and its course was over great flat rocks with occasionally sandy-bottomed pools worn by the fall of water. The place was a favorite summer-time haunt of the old days. It was cool, inviting, and dim with an abundance of fern, green moss, and tiny wild violets.