“Why, if you will be so very kind,” she answered, and she held out her beautiful wrist, from which her hand drooped like a flower from its stem. It was a task of some moments, and the young man wrought at it in silence; when it was done, she did not instantly withdraw her hand, but “Oh, is it really finished?” she asked, and then took it from him and pulled off the glove. She put it up to her hair again, and began to feel about with those women fingers that seem to have all the five senses in their tips; but now they were wise in vain. “I’m afraid, Mr. Easton,” she appealed with a well-embarrassed little laugh, “that I must tax your kindness once more. Would you be so very good as to look what can be the matter?” and she turned the wonder of her neck toward him and bent down her head. “Is it caught, anywhere?”
“It’s caught,” he answered, gravely, “on a hairpin.”
“Oh dear!” sighed Mrs. Farrell.
“May I?” asked Easton, after a pause.
“Why—yes—please,” she answered, faintly.
He knelt down on the rock beside her and with trembling hands touched the warm, fragrant, silken mass, and lightly disengaged the string. When he handed her the hat she thanked him for it very sweetly, and with an air of simple gratitude laid it in her lap, and drew out its long, hanging ribbons through her fingers. She did this looking with a downcast, absent gaze at her hat. When she lifted her eyes again they were full of a gentle sadness. “I hope you won’t think I spoke too lightly of the war and of soldiers, just now.”
“I can’t think you spoke amiss,” he answered, fervently.
“I am sure I meant nothing amiss,” said Mrs. Farrell, humbly. “But everything one does or says in this world,” she continued, “is so liable to misconstruction, that if one values—if one cares for the opinion of others, one feels like doing almost anything to prevent it.”
Her eyes fell again, and she twisted the ribbons of her hat into long curls. “I’m glad that at least you understood me, and I do thank you—yes, more than you can know. How still and beautiful it is here! Do you know, I sometimes think that the boundary, the invisible wall between the two worlds, is nowhere so thin as in the deep woods like this?” Mrs. Farrell looked up at Easton with the eyes of a nun. “It seems as if one could draw nearer to better influences here than anywhere else. Not, of course, but what one can be good anywhere if one wants to be, but it isn’t everywhere that one does want to be good. Don’t laugh at my moralizing, please,” she besought him. “There, take your hat. I won’t make a victim of you. I know you’d hate to wear ferns.”
Easton protested that though he had never worn ferns, he did not believe he should hate to wear them.