For one happy moment her head lay on his arm, and his hand brushed back her hair with a touch that was a caress: she heard his heart beat fast with anxiety; felt his breath on her cheek, and wished that she might die then and there, though a bread-knife was not a romantic weapon, nor a cut finger as interesting as a broken heart. Kitty’s voice made her start up, and the blissful vision of life, with David in the little house alone, vanished like a bright bubble, leaving the hard reality to be lived out with nothing but a woman’s pride to conceal a woman’s most passionate pain.
“It’s nothing: I’m all right now. Don’t say any thing to worry your mother; I’ll put on a bit of court-plaster, and no one will be the wiser,” she said, hastily removing all traces of the accident but her own pale face.
“ONE HAPPY MOMENT.”
“Poor Christie, it’s hard that you should go away with a wound like this on the hand that has done so much for us,” said David, as he carefully adjusted the black strip on that forefinger, roughened by many stitches set for him.
“I loved to do it,” was all Christie trusted herself to say.
“I know you did; and in your own words I can only answer: ‘I don’t know how to thank you, but I never shall forget it.’” And David kissed the wounded hand as gratefully and reverently as if its palm was not hardened by the humblest tasks.
If he had only known—ah, if he had only known!—how easily he might repay that debt, and heal the deeper wound in Christie’s heart. As it was, she could only say, “You are too kind,” and begin to shovel tea into the pot, as Kitty came in, as rosy and fresh as the daisies she put in her hair.
“Ain’t they becoming?” she asked, turning to David for admiration.