Miss Talbot raised her hat from her head, and looked at him. Again he looked at her in silence.
Yes, it was all gone! That glorious hair, which awhile ago had been folded in great masses round her head, was there no longer. She had cut it off! It was short now, like the hair of a young man, and hung loose in wavy curls over her forehead. Yet so far from her appearance being marred or disfigured by such a mutilation, the result was actually more becoming to her as she stood there in her new costume. Few could have made such a sacrifice without serious injury to their appearance; but in this case there was merely a change from one character to another, and all the beauty and all the subtle fascination still remained.
"I couldn't have believed it," said Brooke, at length.
"What?"
"Oh, well—several things. In the first place, I couldn't have believed that any living girl could have made the sacrifice. In the second place, I couldn't have believed that the one who had passed through such an ordeal could come forth more glorious than ever. But the sacrifice was too much. However, it's done. Nay—never shake your gory locks at me. Thou cans't not say I did it. But where is it all?"
"It? what?"
"As if you don't know! Why, the treasure that you threw overboard—the child that you flung to the wolves, Russian mother!"
"Oh, you mean the hair! Why, I left it in there."
She pointed carelessly to the tower. At this Brooke went over and entered it. He saw a mass of hair lying there on the stone floor, where she had carelessly thrown it after cutting it off. This he gathered up very carefully and even tenderly, picking up even small scattered locks of it. Then he rolled it all up into the smallest possible space, after which he bound it tight in his handkerchief and put it in his pocket. He was, as usual, singing to himself snatches of old songs which expressed nothing in particular:
"The maiden she says to him, says she,
Another man's wife I've got to be;
So go thy ways across the sea,
For all is over with you and me.'"