Between the two central pillars we could see the moon streaming full upon the tiled floor; and in the brightness a little figure was standing, sandaled and crowned and in white, a solitary portress of this sylvan lodge. She had heard our approach and she turned, a radiant little creature with bright hair along her straight gown, and drew back and dropped a quick, unmistakable courtesy!
I have seldom been more amazed than by the dipping courtesy of that crowned head. Then I saw to my further bewilderment that the salutation had been intended for me. And as I looked at her a certain familiarity in her prettiness smote me, and I knew her.
“It is Bonnie!” I said.
“O, ma’am,” said Bonnie, “yes’m,” and blushed and waxed still prettier. And this was Bonnie, the little maid whom I had last seen as I sat with Enid’s baby under the pink crab apple-tree; and she was come to Little Rosemont, Avis told me later, because her mother lived there in charge of the cedar linen room. (So her mother cannot have been Demeter after all!) I remembered her because of her really unusual prettiness which in print gowns and white caps was hardly less notable than in this splendour of white robe and unbound hair. It was easy to see why Avis had pressed her in service for the Monday tableaux. It was easy to see that no one could be more charmingly picturesque than Bonnie. And as I looked down in her face upturned to answer some slight thing that I was saying to her, in a flash something else was clear to me. With Bonnie here in this fair guise was it not the easiest matter in the world to see who had been in the mind of that fine young fellow up yonder there, with mandrake in his hands?
It was a wild guess, if you like, but a guess not difficult to make in that place of enchantment. I protest that there are nights when one suspects one’s very gateposts of observing each other kindly across one’s gate.
“Bonnie,” said I, with an instant intention, “come to my room to-night, please, and help me about my unpacking. I’ve something to say to you.”
“O, yes’m,” said Bonnie, and I went away smiling at the incongruity of having a radiant creature in a diadem to brush my sad gray curls.
“I have put her in a tableau,” Avis said, in the carriage, “in ‘The Return of Endymion.’ She is a quaint little Diana. I have never seen such hair.”
On which, “Avis,” I asked serenely, “who, pray, is that fine young fellow hereabout who is in love with Bonnie?”
Avis, sitting tranquil in the white light with a basket of rhinestones in her lap, looked flatteringly startled.