“You know,” he said gravely, “we have a mutual friend.” He drew a blue and gold volume from an inner pocket.
Olive flushed scarlet, but she only said, “Oh, Keats!”
She looked at his hands as they turned the pages; they were clever and kind, she thought, and she wondered if he was an artist or a doctor. Those fingers might set a butterfly’s wing, and yet they seemed very strong. She did not know she had sighed until he said, “Am I boring you?”
“Oh, no,” she answered eagerly. “Please don’t go yet unless you want to. But tell me why you bought that book?”
“If you could have seen yourself as I saw you, you would understand,” he answered. “I once saw a woman on my brother’s estate pick up a piece of gold on the road. She had never had so much money without earning it in her life before, I suppose. At any rate she kissed it, and her face was radiant. She was old and ugly and worn by her long days of toil in the fields, and you— Well, in spite of the differences you reminded me of her, and I am curious to know which poem of Keats brought that swift, rapt light of joy.”
“It was ‘White hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine’—”
Jean found the place and marked the passage before returning the book to his pocket. “Now,” he said, “you will come with me and have some dinner.”