Her head drooped, lowered itself humbly until her hair brushed my arm, and suddenly she kissed my hand, passionately, gratefully. “Oh, Mr. David Dale,” she breathed, “you’re grand! That’s what you are. Yes and yes, and yes!”
And so I ate my dinner with Wanza and Captain Grif sitting opposite me at the table, and Wanza flouted me when I would have served her too liberally with the most succulent bits of the pie, and Captain Grif rallied me when I confessed that I had small appetite, and produced a bottle of root beer and a bag of cheese cakes from the basket.
Night came down at last to my weary soul and soon after it grew dark Wanza and her father departed. I locked the door behind them and I threw myself, dressed as I was, on my bunk and buried my head in the pillows. The evening wore on. The fire sputtered and burned low, the wind came up and hissed around the cabin. A coyote howled from some distant hill. The room grew dark. A pall was on my heart.
As the winter wore on I became vastly interested in Wanza’s education. I gave two hours each day to her lessons. And not many evenings passed without lessons in the snug little room beneath the eaves of the cottage she called home. There with our books open before us, beneath the light from the swinging lamp, we pored over tedious pages shoulder to shoulder, smiled on by old Grif and encouraged by Father O’Shan, who ofttimes shared our evenings.
It was wonderful the improvement I marked in Wanza as the weeks slipped past. Her English improved markedly. She was painstaking and indefatigable. She applied herself so assiduously that I began to fear lest she should overwork, as the warm spring days came on.
“Don’t study too hard,” I cautioned her one day.
“I can’t study too hard,” she flashed back at me. And then she smiled. But I knew she was terribly in earnest.
It was that same day that Father O’Shan quoted to me, as we were walking along the river road together:
“Shed no tear—Oh, shed no tear!
The flower will bloom another year.