No bark of pine tree was browner than her eyes; no berries were redder than her lips, nor the color that climbed upward in her cheeks, the white of which was as that of the fir beneath its outer covering. As some forest dryad, maidenly and diffident, she held her hand above her heart when Adam looked up and discovered her presence.
The man leaped to his feet, like one startled from sleep. It almost seemed as if a dream had brought him this radiant figure. No word came, for a moment, to his lips.
“Why—it’s you!” said Garde.
“Garde!—Miss—Mistress Merrill!” said Adam, stammering. “By my hilt, I—the—the wonder is ’tis you.”
“Not at all,” corrected Garde, recovering something that passed for composure. “I come here frequently, to gather herbs and simples for Goody Dune, but for you to be here, and playing—like that——”
“Yes,” agreed Adam, when he had waited in vain for her to finish, “perhaps it is an intrusion. You—you came away from the town early.”
“Why did you come here to play?” she asked. Her own nature so yearned over the forest and things beautiful, her own emotions were so wrought upon by the sublimity of earth’s chancels of silence, that she felt her soul longing for its kindred companion, who must be one reverent, yet joyous, where Nature ruled. She wanted Adam to pour forth the tale of his brotherhood with the trees and the loneliness of his heart, that would make him thus to play in such a place and at such a time. While she looked at him, the love she had fostered from her childhood was matured in one glorious blush that welled upward from her bosom to her very eyes themselves.
Adam had looked at her but once. It was a long look, somewhat sad, as of one parting with a dear companion. In that moment he had known how wholly and absolutely he loved her. His pretended doubts of the night before had fled as with the darkness. The daylight in her eyes and on her face had made him henceforth a sun-worshiper, since the sun revealed her in such purity of beauty.
In the great delight which had bounded in his breast at seeing her there, he had momentarily forgotten his conversation with Wainsworth. When she asked him why he had come to the woods, he would fain have knelt before her, to speak of his love, to tell of his anguish and to plead his cause, by every leap of his heart, but he had remembered his friend and his old Indian schooling in stoicism gathered upon him, doubtless for the very presence of the firs and pines, so solemn and Indianesque about him. He put on a mask he had worn over melancholy often.
“Why, I came here for practise, of which I am sadly in need,” he said. “When once I played before King Pirate and his court of buccaneers, I was like to be hung for failing, after a mere six hours of steady scraping at the strings. If you came for simples, verily you have found a simple performer and simple tunes.”