It happened that, as she spoke, Leah herself came into the room with letters for me. Miss Fielding took the girl's hand and pressed it against her own cheek affectionately. As she did so, I noticed a peculiar scar—a livid U-shaped mark on Leah's wrist. It was the sort of scar that might be left from the wound of a carving-tool—one of the narrower gouges.
"Was I very horrid yesterday, Leah?" Miss Fielding asked, looking up into the fine brown face.
"Oh, please, Miss Joy!" Leah begged uneasily.
"Of course you understand, Leah; I only want Mr. Castle to know I'm sorry," Miss Fielding insisted.
"I need only to look at you to be sure you're sorry, and to look at Leah to be sure that there's no need of it," I declared. "At any rate, there's no need of my understanding. In fact that's just what I thought you didn't want me to do. Isn't it?"
Leah looked quickly from me to Miss Fielding, and back again.
"Yes, I suppose it is," Miss Fielding said slowly, thoughtfully. "Let's get back on the island again. I'm sure it's big enough for us."
We stayed, therefore, "on the island" all that afternoon, touching, that is, but lightly on personal topics. But though we did not go wide, we went deep enough to make the talk hold us absorbed for an hour or more. In quite another way, I think, we went far, as well. Miss Fielding was a stimulating conversationalist. She made me feel at my best. She had that happy way of meeting me on my ground every little while, then going on, and giving me a hand up to hers, and so, by a series of alternate agreements and divergencies, keeping the discussion both sympathetic and various. In most of this quick give-and-take Leah was a passive listener unless specially appealed to, at which times she often expressed herself so succinctly and sapiently that Miss Fielding and I looked at her, and then at one another with a comic expression of admiration and depreciation of our own powers.
With such conversation the day went fast. In the afternoon Miss Fielding read to me, and in the evening I spent two or three hours in passive delight listening to her violin.
My pain had almost subsided, now, and I looked forward with something more poignant than regret at being able to be up and about, knowing that would mean the beginning of the end of our companionship.