She thrust them into her pocket.
“Of course they’re mine,” she said indignantly, and turned to go.
“We’ll waive proof of property and that sort of thing,” I remarked, with, I fear, the hope of detaining her. “I’m sorry not to establish a more neighborly feeling with St. Agatha’s. The stone wall may seem formidable, but it’s not of my building. I must open the gate. That wall’s a trifle steep for climbing.”
I was amusing myself with the idea that my identity was a dark mystery to her. I had read English novels in which the young lord of the manor is always mistaken for the game-keeper’s son by the pretty daughter of the curate who has come home from school to be the belle of the county. But my lady of the red tam-o’-shanter was not a creature of illusions.
“It serves a very good purpose—the wall, I mean— Mr. Glenarm.”
She was walking down the steps and I followed. I am not a man to suffer a lost school-girl to cross my lands unattended in a snow-storm; and the piazza of a boat-house is not, I submit, a pleasant loafing-place on a winter day. She marched before me, her hands in her pockets—I liked her particularly that way—with an easy swing and a light and certain step. Her remark about the wall did not encourage further conversation and I fell back upon the poets.
“Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage,”
I quoted. Quoting poetry in a snow-storm while you stumble through a woodland behind a girl who shows no interest in either your prose or your rhymes has its embarrassments, particularly when you are breathing a trifle hard from the swift pace your auditor is leading you.
“I have heard that before,” she said, half-turning her face, then laughing as she hastened on.
Her brilliant cheeks were a delight to the eye. The snow swirled about her, whitened the crown of her red cap and clung to her shoulders. Have you ever seen snow-crystals gleam, break, dissolve in fair, soft, storm-blown hair? Do you know how a man will pledge his soul that a particular flake will never fade, never cease to rest upon a certain flying strand over a girlish temple? And he loses—his heart and his wager—in a breath! If you fail to understand these things, and are furthermore unfamiliar with the fact that the color in the cheeks of a girl who walks abroad in a driving snow-storm marks the favor of Heaven itself, then I waste time, and you will do well to rap at the door of another inn.