nd the girl worked hard, but no night passed that
she did not spend an hour or more on her books, and by degrees she
bribed and stormed Bub into learning his A, B, C's and digging at a
blue-back spelling book. But all through the day there were times when
she could play with the boy in the garden, and every afternoon, when
it was not raining, she would slip away to a little ravine behind the
cabin, where a log had fallen across a little brook, and there in the
cool, sun-pierced shadows she would study, read and dream--with the
water bubbling underneath and wood-thrushes singing overhead. For Hale
kept her well supplied with books. He had given her children's books
at first, but she outgrew them when the first love-story fell into her
hands, and then he gave her novels--good, old ones and the best of the
new ones, and they were to her what water is to a thing athirst. But the
happy days were when Hale was there. She had a thousand questions for
him to answer, whenever he came, about birds, trees and flowers and the
things she read in her books. The words she could not understand in them
she marked, so that she could ask their meaning, and it was amazing how
her vocabulary increased. Moreover, she was always trying to use the
new words she learned, and her speech was thus a quaint mixture of
vernacular, self-corrections and unexpected words. Happening once to
have a volume of Keats in his pocket, he read some of it to her, and
while she could not understand, the music of the lines fascinated her
and she had him leave that with her, too. She never tired hearing him
tell of the places where he had been and the people he knew and the
music and plays he had heard and seen. And when he told her that she,
too, should see all those wonderful things some day, her deep eyes took
fire and she dropped her head far back between her shoulders and looked
long at the stars that held but little more wonder for her than the
world of which he told. But each time he was there she grew noticeably
shyer with him and never once was the love-theme between them taken up
in open words. Hale was reluctant, if only because she was still such a
child, and if he took her hand or put his own on her wonderful head or
his arm around her as they stood in the garden under the stars--he did
it as to a child, though the leap in her eyes and the quickening of his
own heart told him the lie that he was acting, rightly, to her and to
himself. And no more now wer