A gentle pallor at that, as though I had been strong and seemly in her sight; the Basin eyes fixed on me as if with a community of experience and sorrow.
"Shall you go away from the Basin this winter, as you did before?"
"I think so;" for myself, I could not look at her. "You see, I have my—'show,' that I must attend to a little in the winter: and here, exposed to the hard climate, if I were taken ill, or should be in want, there is no one who would care for me, you know."
"You should never want or suffer," cried Vesty of the Basins, "while I have two hands to work with!"
"Perhaps then," I murmured gravely, with sphinx face, "I might stay. I have to ask so much, Vesty, you see. All my life seems to be asking, not giving."
"I don't know who you are!" said she, with puzzled brow, the utter frankness of Basin speech escaping her unawares. "What I thought first, when I saw you—I never mind that now. And you are poor and all alone, and you never make anything of yourself—but somehow I always think you are pretending; somehow—I think—you are stronger than us all."
"You are a little arch-flatterer," I said; "and the Basin, out of its goodness of heart, has made me vain, that is all. It won't do. I need to sweep some more floors and peel some more potatoes." She would not smile; she shook her puzzled head at me. "And, Vesty," I said, "where are you going now?"
"Why, to Uncle Benny's! Didn't you know?" exclaimed the girl eagerly, with whom the realities of life were always pressing, stern. "He stood out in the water, that day, helping get the men in, and he was around that evening, singing, without any dry clothes or fire; nobody thought, then. And you know he 's had a cough ever since, and now—he 's sick."
A thought smote me. "He won't lead the children to school any more, then?"
Vesty's lip quivered. "Come," she said; "he has asked for you."