“I know it,” he replied.
“Then it’s all right, if you do know it,” I said, cheerfully. “All I can say is, I am thankful she isn’t to spend her life in the circus.”
“Or meet death there,” he added. “It’s not to our credit that she escapes it.”
Jacqueline came dancing back to the porch, cat under one arm, book under the other, so frankly happy, so charmingly grateful for Speed’s society, that the tragedy of the lonely child touched me very deeply. I strove to discover any trace of the bar sinister in her, but could not, though now I understood, from her parentage, how it was possible for a poacher’s child to have such finely sculptured hands and feet. Perhaps her dark, silky lashes and hair were Mornac’s, but if this was so, I trusted that there the aristocratic blood had spent its force in the frail body of this child of chance.
I went into the house, leaving them seated on the porch, heads together, while in a low monotone Speed read the deathless “Morte d’Arthur.”
Daylight was waning.
Out of the west a clear, greenish sky, tinged with saffron tints, promised a sea-wind. But the mild land-breeze was still blowing and the ebb-tide flowing as I entered the corridor and glanced at the corner where the spinning-wheel stood. Sylvia sat beside it, reading in the Lutheran Bible by the failing light.
She raised her dreamy eyes as I passed; I had never seen her piquantly expressive face so grave.
“May I speak to you alone a moment, after dinner?” I asked.
“If you wish,” she replied.