JOHN VALIANT MAKES A DISCOVERY
“
I’m so sorry,” was what he said, as he kneeled to release her, and she was grateful that his tone was unmixed with amusement. She bit her lips, as by sheer strength of elbow and knee he snapped the offending bole short off—one of those quick exhibitions of reserved strength that every woman likes. Meanwhile he was uttering banal fragments of sentences: “I hope you’re not hurt. It was that unmannerly dog, I suppose. What a sword-edge that sliver has! A bad tear, I’m afraid. There!—now it’s all right.”
“I don’t know how I could have been so silly—thank you so much,” said Shirley, panting slightly from her exertions. “I’m not the least bit hurt—only my dress—and you know very well that I wasn’t afraid of that ridiculous dog.” A richer glow stole to her cheeks as she spoke, a burning recollection of a rose, which from her horse that morning at Damory Court, she had glimpsed in its glass on the porch.
Both laughed a little. He imagined that he could smell that wonderful hair, a subtle fragrance like that of sun-dried seaweed or the elusive scent that clings to a tuft of long-plucked Spanish moss. “Chum stands absolved, then,” he said, bending to sweep together the scattered jessamine. “Do you—do you run like that when you’re not frightened?”
“When I’m caught red-handed. Don’t you?”
He looked puzzled.
She pointed to the flowers. “I had stolen them, and I was trying to ‘’scape off wid ’em’ as the negroes say. Shocking, isn’t it? But you see, nobody has lived here since long before I was born, and I suppose the flower-thieving habit has become ingrown.”
“But,” he interrupted, “there’s acres of them going to waste. Why on earth shouldn’t you have them?”
“Of course I know better to-day, but there was a—a special reason. We have none and this is the nearest place where they grow. My mother wanted some for this particular day.”