“All night I was reading the book you lent me. The Lady of the Lake! Such a long beautiful story, and so sad! What a sad thing love is, and how old! So many of us poor lovers have loved in vain—haven’t we, honey? They’ll tell us that we’re too young to love, but oh, darling, darling, I feel so old, so old! And how can I ever stand the years that must go by before we can be together? You’ve got to finish your college and make your way. I’d rather die than hinder you from being the great man you’re going to be. And I can’t help you. I’m so poor and friendless and ignorant.
“But when I think, when I think of the years, the years, the years, I want to lie down in that water there and fold my hands and drown. For even when you are rich and famous—what would your father and mother say if you told them that you wanted to marry me? Your father is rich and famous and everybody respects him. I’m just one of the Lashers.”
The boy had the RoBards talent for silence and he had listened as quietly as his hidden father. Even now he only mumbled:
“I’ll marry you or nobody, Aletta. This is a free country!”
An eerie laugh broke from the girl’s throat as she cried:
“A free country! How could there be a free country anywhere? Least of all here?”
RoBards was grimly glad that she had sanity enough to understand this truth at least and the wildness of his boy’s infatuation. To marry the impossible sister of the unspeakable wretch that his own father had put to death—that would be impossible; if anything were.
He risked discovery and leaned out to have a look at this weird creature whose voice had woven such unholy power about his son.
She was perched aloft on a little peak of rock a few yards away. The boy lay along the slope of it, clinging to her right hand. There was reverence in his manner. She was sacred to him and he to her in the religion of young love. Her left hand held the book she had spoken of. It rested like a harp on the wave of her thigh. Her feet were bare, though the air was cold; they were shapely feet. She was shapely everywhere, and there was a primeval grace, a loveliness about her every outline. Womanhood was disclosing its growth and its spell, straining at the scant and shabby dress and enveloping her in beauty like a drapery of mist.
She might have been indeed the nymph of this pool, luring a faun to his death in a fatal element. But to RoBards the life-fearing little pauper had the terrifying power of a Lorelei throned on a storm-beaten cliff and chanting his hapless son to shipwreck.