“Surely, although the mistress bade me say that she is presently coming to look once more at your wounded hands and arms.”
“Oh, they are all but well. Sound flesh and good blood like mine heal apace.” And Sir Christopher, with a self-approving smile, held up his well-shaped hands and straightened his comely figure.
John Alden looked and listened, but made no response, unless a slow smile that began almost imperceptibly, and widened and widened until it showed nearly all his broad white teeth, could be called so. But before it gained its full development he had left the room.
CHAPTER XVII.
“TWO IS COMPANY, THREE IS TRUMPERY!”
And so it fell that about three o’clock that afternoon, as Sir Christopher Gardiner and Betty Alden wandered along the southern foot of Burying Hill, then called Fort Hill, searching under the lee of every rock and clump of bushes for the epigæa, as often to be found by its pure spicy fragrance as by sight of its coy clusters of pink and white blossoms, Prissie Carpenter, a little basket in her hand, came strolling along the brookside, rather ostentatiously bound upon the same errand.
“Now would I like the skill of a painter fellow I knew in Holland, one Martin Ryckaert, a man I could take by the heel and eat him body and bones as I would a prawn; but give him his charcoal and his paints and his canvas, and he’d picture out this scene for you as if you saw it.”
So spake Sir Christopher, who, old swashbuckler though he was, possessed a real love of nature and a real appreciation of beauty in whatever form it revealed itself, as he stood upright with folded arms and looked about him, while Betty, her little fingers grimed with soil and scratched with briers, delved amid the thickset ground pine to find the flowers hiding there.