“Yes,” replied the girl uncertainly. Another flush, a deeper color in her cheeks, allowed him to guess at Abram’s illness. “No; I call him that, but—he’s all I have; and she was so good to me—his wife. She sent me to school winters, and wouldn’t let—as long as she lived—”
Her words, lingering unfinished, her look penetrating the hidden distances of the fog, seemed to dismiss a memory down some long vista.
“Were you afraid?” said Miles, between strokes.
“Of course I was,” she laughed. Her instant change of mood, her glance swiftly returning to close quarters, but above all the radiant conflict about lips and eyes, the honest mischief and shy directness, struck him into a panic joy. No countenance had ever looked so quick with various meaning, so tremulous with color, so dangerously awake and alive, as her face now in this floating dawn, this cold, nebulous, elemental light of the sea mist. It was a discovery in his life, a mystery, and a power. He could have ferried her to the farthest continent.
“Afraid?” she said. “What else? I thought I was slipping out into the big ocean. And the fog all round! It was like—like sitting alone with a lot of years. I thought of my sins!”
“You can’t have many.” The words sprang from impulse, free admiration; he could have hammered out no compliments; but she willfully mistook him, and laughed his honesty aside.
“Ah now, what a tongue you have!” And with a provoking smile, bending aside her look, she studied the smoky water that drew astern. Under the gray cardigan jacket, her slight, active body in the blue calico reminded him oddly of nacre shining in some uncouth shell, or of hazelnuts when frost has split the rough beard.
A strange motive, as strong as it was new, forced him to say:—
“The first time I saw you—” All conclusion suddenly failed him. “Do you remember it?”
“Remember?” Again, and more deeply, she watched the slow sweep of the current; and more deeply her blood tinted the sun-burned, oval face. She tossed her head with a little shake, more of impatience than of denial. “No, I—I can’t remember.”