Names, incidents, circumstances almost forgotten even in her brief solitary life, were now uttered almost unbidden from her ardent lips; the bright or faded bits of ribbon were held aloft, identified with a little laugh or sigh, tossed aside, and another relic uncovered and held out to him.
On her knees before these innocent records of the past, the girl was showing him everything she knew about herself—showing him herself, too, and her warm, eager heart of a child.
He was no longer merely amused; he stood listening in silence to her happy, disjointed phrases, evoked by flashes of memory equally disconnected.
The happiness connected with her girlish souvenirs faded, however, when they represented the period following her removal from school.
And yet, for all the loneliness and unhappiness—for all the instinctive mental revolt, all the perplexity and impatience of these latter years—their souvenirs she handled tenderly, describing each with that gentleness and consideration born of intimate personal association.
And at last she discovered her account book, strapped with rubber bands, and she rose from the floor, drew the only chair up for Warner, and seated herself on her bed, laying the book open across his knees.
Here, under his eyes, columns of accurately kept figures told the story. Here everything had been minutely set down—her meager salary, her few expenses, her rigid economies, her savings during the years of her employment by Wildresse—a record of self-denial, of rigid honesty, of childlike perseverance.
As he slowly turned the clearly written pages on his knees, Philippa, leaning against his shoulder, her fresh young face close to his, pointed out and explained with her forefinger tracing the written figures.
After he had examined her accounts, she unstrapped her thin little pass book for him. It was in order and balanced to the end of July.
He closed the books, rested his clasped hands on them, and sat thinking. His preoccupied expression left her silent, too—or perhaps it was the slight reaction from her joyous indulgence in loquacity. Reticence always follows—and always this aftermath of silence is tinged with sadness.