“O, ma’am,” she said, her lips trembling, “you don’t know what this will mean to them—you don’t know!”
“Let me see your book, my dear,” I said hastily, ashamed enough to be praised for indulging my own desire to rest.
She handed the distinguished-looking little volume and I saw that it was a very bouquet of sea poems, sea songs, sea delight in every form. Beloved names nodded to me from the page and beloved lines smiled up at me.
“The settlement lady lief me take it,” said Little Invalid.
Then began an hour whose joy Pelleas and I love to remember. It would have been pleasure merely to sit in that veranda corner within sound of the sea and to hear Pelleas read those magic words; but we had a new and unexpected joy in the response of this untutored little maid who was as eager as were we. With her eyes now on the sea, now on the face of Pelleas as he read, now turned to me with the swift surprise of something that his voice held for her, she sat breathlessly between us; and sometimes when a passage had to be explained her eyes were like the sea itself with the sun penetrating to its unsounded heart.
“Oh,” she would say, “was it all there all the time—was it? I read it alone but I didn’t know it was like this!”
It puzzled her to find that what we were reading had been known and loved by us for very long.
“Did the settlement lady lief you have the book, too?” she asked finally.
“No,” we told her, “we have these things in other books, ourselves.”
“Why, I thought,” she said then in bewilderment, “that there was only one book of every kind. And I thought how grand for me to have this one, and that I’d ought to lend it to people who wouldn’t ever see it if I didn’t. Is there other ones like it?” she asked.