“I must see what it is,” she said very gently.
Basil stood where he was as though turned to stone. Would she take it away—or would she put it back? He could not see her, for he stood with his back to her, and seemed incapable of turning round. His mother, noting the disarrangement of the flowers, drew out the little packet, and, holding her candle close, read the inscription in the large uncertain writing:
“Dear Grandfather,
“I’m sory it’s not a cleane pak, but I don’t know where they are.
“Your loving boy,
“Basil.”
AN IRON SEAT
He sat at one end of the seat, she at the other, and the seat was on the cliffs overlooking the sea at Wolsuth on the Suffolk coast. They say that if your eyes were strong enough you could see the coast of Holland; but even with telescopes no one has yet succeeded in doing that.
At first he hardly noticed her—she was so small and still and read her book so assiduously; but she could have passed a searching examination as to his appearance, for she had studied it carefully. She would have told you that he was tall, and thin, and dark, and “rather old”; that his beard was grey, though his hair was black and decidedly thin on the top; that his spectacles had gold rims and the eyes behind them were very kind; that his manner struck you as extremely grave and decorous: what impressed her most, however, was that big, dull, paper-covered book he was always reading. She was sure it was dull, for she couldn’t read a word of it; it was in German—she knew that much, and she had tried to pronounce the title to herself in bed at night, but never came near it at all, for it looked like this: “Mendelejeef Chemie,” and it would take a very sharp little girl of ten to make much out of that.
No one ever came to sit between them on that iron seat; it was far from the esplanade, and overlooked a lonely part of the beach where there were no “entertainments.” When they had sat there for several days, the man who read “Mendelejeef Chemie” looked up suddenly to find that his companion at the other end of the seat was wiping her eyes with the absurdest little red-bordered handkerchief. She held her book in one hand—a somewhat large and heavy book for such a little hand—and wiped her eyes with the other, and yet the man was sure that she was not unhappy, for her thin brown cheeks were flushed, and though her mouth was tremulous it wore a proud and happy smile. He was devoured by curiosity. What book could it be that had the power to move a little girl in so complex a fashion?
He shifted down the seat toward her; but she was so absorbed in what she was reading that she never looked his way, and he found that the book she held in her hand was “From London to Ladysmith via Pretoria.”