"I meant to, mademoiselle," said Ste. Marie. "I meant to. Consider my reasons. Consider what I was pleading for!" And he gave a little laugh when the colour began again to rise in the girl's cheeks.
She turned away from him, shaking her head, and he thought that he had said too much and that she was offended, but after a moment the girl looked up and, when she met his eyes, she laughed outright.
"I cannot for ever be scowling and snarling at you," said she. "It is quite too absurd. Will you sit down for a little while? I don't know whether or not my father would approve, but we have met here by accident, and there can be no harm surely in our exchanging a few civil words. If you try to bring up forbidden topics I can simply go away—and besides Michel stands ready to murder you if it should become necessary. I think his failure of a week ago is very heavy on his conscience."
Ste. Marie sat down in one corner of the long stone bench, and he was very glad to do it, for his leg was beginning to cause him some discomfort. It felt hot, and as if there were a very tight band round it above the knee. The relief must have been apparent in his face, for Mlle. O'Hara looked at him in silence for a moment, and she gave a little troubled anxious frown. Men can be quite indifferent to suffering in each other if the suffering is not extreme, and women can be too; but men are quite miserable in the presence of a woman who is in pain, and women, before a suffering man, while they are not miserable are always full of a desire to do something that will help. And that might be a small additional proof (if any more proof were necessary) that they are much the more practical of the two sexes.
The girl's sharp glance seemed to assure her that Ste. Marie was comfortable, now that he was sitting down, for the frown went from her brows, and she began to arrange the mysterious white garment in her lap in preparation to go on with her work.
Ste. Marie watched her for awhile in a contented silence. The leaves overhead stirred under a puff of air, and a single yellow beam of sunlight came down and shivered upon the girl's dark head and played about the bundle of white over which her hands were busy. She moved aside to avoid it, but it followed her, and when she moved back it followed again and danced in her lap, as if it were a live thing with a malicious sense of humour. It might have been Tinker Bell out of Peter Pan, only it did not jingle. Mlle. O'Hara uttered an exclamation of annoyance, and Ste. Marie laughed at her, but in a moment the leaves overhead were still again, and the sunbeam with a sense of humour was gone to torment some one else.
Still, neither of the two spoke, and Ste. Marie continued to watch the girl bent above her sewing. He was thinking of what she had said to him when he asked her if she read Spanish—that her mother had been Spanish. That would account then for her dark eyes. It would account for the darkness of her skin too, but not for its extraordinary clearness and delicacy, for Spanish women are apt to have dull skins of an opaque texture. This was, he said to himself, an Irish skin with a darker stain, and he was quite sure that he had never before seen anything at all like it.
Apart from colouring she was all Irish, of the type which has become famous the world over, and which in the opinion of men who have seen women in all countries, and have studied them, is the most beautiful type that exists in our time.
Ste. Marie was dark himself and, in the ordinary nature of things, he should have preferred a fair type in women. In theory, for that matter, he did prefer it; but it was impossible for him to sit near Coira O'Hara, and watch her bent head and busy hovering hands and remain unstirred by her splendid beauty. He found himself wondering why one kind of loveliness more than another should exert a potent and mysterious spell by virtue of mere proximity, and when the woman who bore it was entirely passive. If this girl had been looking at him the matter would have been easy to understand, for an eye-glance is often downright hypnotic, but she was looking at the work in her hands and, so far as could be judged, she had altogether forgotten his presence; yet the mysterious spell, the potent enchantment, breathed from her like a vapour, and he could not be insensible to it. It was like sorcery.
The girl looked up so suddenly that Ste. Marie jumped. She said—