The singing of the children was waxing fainter, as the boat floated from beneath the wall on its homeward way into the town. She ceased to fancy these cries the cries of her foes, and recollection began to revive in her.
"Why did you come?" he repeated, musing how he should persuade her to return to the attitude sketched out upon his easel.
She returned his look with the bold truthfulness natural to her, joined with the apprehensiveness of chastisement which becomes second nature to every creature that is forever censured, cursed, and beaten for every real or imagined fault.
"I came to see those," she answered him, with a backward movement of her hand, which had a sort of reverence in it, up to the forms of the gods above her.
The answer moved him; he had not thought to find a feeling so high as this in this ragged, lonely, sunburnt child; and, to the man for whom, throughout a youth of ambition and of disappointment, the world had never found the voice of favor, even so much appreciation as lay in this outcast's homage had its certain sweetness. For a man may be negligent of all sympathy for himself, yet never, if he be poet or artist, will he be able utterly to teach himself indifference to all sympathy for his works.
"Those!" he echoed, in surprise. "What can they be to you?"
She colored at the unconcealed contempt that lay in his last word; her head drooped; she knew that they were much to her—friends, masters, teachers divine and full of pity. But she had no language in which to tell him this; and if she could have told him, she would have been ashamed. Also, the remembrance of those benefits to him, of which he was ignorant, had now come to her through the bewilderment of her thoughts, and it locked her lips to silence.
Her eyes dropped under his; the strange love she bore him made her blind and giddy and afraid; she moved restlessly, glaring round with the half-timid, half-fierce glances of a wild animal that desires to escape and cannot.
Watching her more closely, he noticed for the first time the stains of blood upon her shoulder, and the bruise on her chest, where the rent in her linen left it bare.
"You have been hurt?" he asked her, "or wounded?"