A Growing Interest
At first, Rosemary had been purely negative to him, and he regarded her with kindly indifference. The girl's personality seemed as ashen as her hair, as colourless as her face. Her dull eyes seemed to see nothing, to care for nothing. Within the last few months he had begun to wonder whether her cold and impassive exterior might not be the shield with which she protected an abnormal sensitiveness. Now and then he had longed to awaken the woman who dwelt securely within the forbidding fortress—to strike from the flint some stray gleams of soul.
Of late he had begun to miss her, and, each afternoon, to look with a little more conscious eagerness for the scarlet thread on the hill-top signalling against the grey sky beyond. His interest in her welfare was becoming more surely personal, not merely human. During the Winter, though he had seen her only twice, he had thought about her a great deal, and had written to her several times without expecting an answer.
The iron bars of circumstance which bound her, had, though less narrowly, imprisoned him also. It seemed permanent for them both, and, indeed, the way of escape was even more definitely closed for Rosemary than for him.
A New Rosemary
He sighed as he rose and brushed the chalk from his clothes. Through force of habit, he looked up to the crest of the Hill of the Muses as he locked the door. The red ribbon fluttered like an oriflamme against the blue-and-white of the April sky. His heart quickened its beat a little as he saw it, and his steps insensibly hastened as he began to climb the hill.
When he took her hand, with a word of friendly greeting, he noticed a change in her, though she had made a valiant effort to recover her composure. This was a new Rosemary, with eyes shining and the colour flaming in her cheeks and lips.
"Spring seems to have come to you, too," he said, seating himself on the log beside her. "How well you look!"
The deep crimson mounted to her temples, then as swiftly retreated. "Better take down the ribbon," she suggested, practically.
"I've been watching a long time for this," he resumed, as he folded it and restored it to its place in the hollow tree. "What have you been doing?"