“You’re so changed, Joan,” he said one day abruptly. “You’ve grown as thin as a reed, child; I can see every bone, and your eyes—don’t you ever shut them any more?”
Joan, prone on the skin before the fire, elbows on the fur, hands to her temples, face bent over a book, looked up impatiently.
“I’d not be talkin’ now if I was you, Mr. Gael. You had ought to be writin’ an’ I’m readin’. I can’t talk an’ read; seems when I do a thing I just hed to do it!”
Prosper laughed and returned chidden to his task, but he couldn’t help watching her, lying there in her blue frock across his floor, like a tall, thin Magdalene, all her rich hair fallen wildly about her face. She was such a child, such a child!
CHAPTER XIV
JOAN RUNS AWAY
It was a January night when Joan, her rough head almost in the ashes, had read “Isabella and the Pot of Basil” by the light of flames. It was in March, a gray, still afternoon, when, looking through Prosper’s bookcase, she came upon the tale again.
Prosper was outdoors cutting a tunnel, freshly blocked with snow, and Joan, having finished the “Life of Cellini,” a writer she loathed, but whose gorgeous fabrications her master had forced her to read, now hurried to the book-shelves in search of something more to her taste. She had the gay air of a holiday-seeker, returned “Cellini” with a smart push, and kneeling, ran her finger along the volumes, pausing on a binding of bright blue-and-gold. It was the color that had pleased her and the fat, square shape, also the look of fair and well-spaced type. She took the book and squatted on the rug happy as a child with a new toy of his own choosing.