"Especially if it is a wise child," she replied. Her eyes were dancing with mirth, a scarlet signal burned on either cheek, and her parted lips were crimson. She seemed lovelier to him than ever before.
"Honestly, Rose, you seem to get prettier every day."
"Then," she smiled, "if I were younger, I might eventually become dangerous."
"Rose—"
"Old Rose," she interrupted. The high colour faded from her face as she spoke and left her pale.
Allison put his hand on her arm and stopped. "Rose, please don't. You're not a day older than I am."
"Ten years," she insisted stubbornly, for women are wont to lean upon the knife that stabs them and she was in a reckless mood. "When you're forty, I'll be fifty."
A shadow crossed his face. "It hurts me, someway, to have you talk so. I don't know how—nor why."
In a single swift surge her colour came back. "All right," she answered, quietly, "hereafter I'm thirty, also. Thanking you for giving me ten more years of life, for I love it so!"
The sun was well up in the heavens when they came to the river, and the dark, rippling surface gave back the light in a thousand little dancing gleams. The ice was broken, the snow was gone, and fragments of shattered crystal went gently toward the open sea, lured by the song of the river underneath.