An expression of pain swept over Alice's face.
"I know, Mr. Moore, how you must regard me; and I can not blame you for it. I know that I am ignorant—a foolish, ignorant child,—that my dress is odd, my manner awkward,—that the world, if it should see me, would laugh at me—that my mind is uncultivated,—but oh, Mr. Moore, you do not know how eager I am to learn—how hard I should study! I wish my father would send me away to school."
"That would just spoil your sweet, peculiar charms, little Alice."
He smoothed her hair soothingly, as he would have done a child's; but something in her tone had put a new thought in his mind; he looked at her earnestly as she blushed beneath this first slight caress which he had ever given her. "Can it be so?" he asked himself; and in his eyes the young girl suddenly took more womanly proportions. "How very—how exquisitely beautiful she is now, with the soul glowing through her face. Shall I ever again see a woman such as this—pure as an infant, loving, devoted, unselfish, and so beautiful?" Another face, haughty, clear-cut, with braids of perfumed black hair, arose before his mental vision, and took place beside this sweet, troubled countenance. One so unmoved, so determined, even in the moment of giving bitter pain—this other so confiding, so shy, so full of every girlish beauty. Philip was touched—almost to saying something which he might afterward regret; but he was a Moore, and he had his pride and his prejudices, stubborn as old Mortimer Moore's, nearly. These hardened his heart against the sentiment he saw trembling through that eloquent countenance.
"You are but a little girl yet, and will have plenty of chance to grow wise," he continued playfully. "This pretty Wilde-rose 'needs not the foreign aid of ornament.' When I come again, I hope to find her just as she is now—unless she should have become the bride of that stalwart forester."
"Then you are coming again?" she asked, ignoring the cruel kindness of the latter part of his speech, and thinking only of that dim future possibility of again seeing and hearing him, again being in his presence, no matter how indifferent he might be to her.
For Alice Wilde, adoring him as no man ever deserved to be adored, still, in her forest simplicity, called not her passion love, nor cherished it from any hope of its being reciprocated. No; she herself considered herself unworthy of the thought of one so much more accomplished, so much wiser than herself. Her's was
"The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow;"
and now that there was a chance in the future for her to burn her white wings still more cruelly, she grew a shade happier.