Her teeth shone like pearls as she smiled and held out the spray. How beautiful she was! with those delicate features and the large dark eyes!—eyes that were softer than Ketira’s. Taking the little paper book from my pocket, and some of the gilt leaf from between its tissue leaves, I wetted the oak-ball and gilded it. Kettie watched intently.
“Where did you get it all from?” she asked, meaning the gilt leaf.
“I bought it at Hewitt’s. Don’t you know the shop? A stationer’s; next door to Pettipher the druggist’s. Hewitt does no end of a trade in these leaves on the twenty-ninth of May.”
“Did you buy it to gild oak-balls for yourself, sir?”
“For the young ones at home: Hugh and Lena. There it is, Kettie.”
Had it been a ball of solid gold that I put into her hand, instead of a gilded oak-ball, Kettie could not have shown more intense delight. Her cheeks flushed; the wonderful brilliancy that joy brought to her eyes caused my own eyes to turn away. For her eighteen years she was childish in some things; very much so, considering the experience that her wandering life must (as one would suppose) have brought her. In replacing the spray within her cloak, Kettie dropped something out of her hand—apparently a small box folded in paper. I picked it up.
“Is it a fairing, Kettie? But this is not fair time.”
“It is—I forget the name,” she replied, looking at me and hesitating. “My mother is ill; the pains are in her shoulder again; and my uncle Abel has given me this to rub upon it, the same that did her good before. I cannot just call the name to mind in the English tongue.”
“Say it in your own.”
She spoke a very outlandish word, laughed, and turned red again. Certainly there never lived a more modest girl than Kettie.