He sang with little art, but with every word clear, and as a man alone sings for company of sound.
Rose stood still and heard it out, liking it, but hesitated a little, half hid behind a huge pine,—a pleasant picture of a maiden struck shy of a sudden. What had happened? There is a little timepiece which Cupid winds up. It ticks quietly, and by and by strikes a fateful hour, or we take it out to see how goes the enemy, and behold! it is to-morrow. Love is the fool of time.
Rose stood a moment, as I have said, not forty feet away, a little inclined to retreat,—aware that, if detected, this would mean something, she knew not what. At last, seeing the need of action, she made a strategic movement to left, and said, “Are you looking for Truth?”
“Good heavens! Miss Lyndsay,” and he rose from his seat on the edge of the well. The prettiness of the picture struck him as Rose came forward: the pink gown, fresh from the looms of fairy-land, set fair against the greenwood spaces, the faint excess of color in her cheeks, and the look of unconsciousness which goes surely with natural distinction of carriage.
“Did you come up out of Mother Earth? Are you sure it is you?”
“I am. I came over to give my grilse to Mrs. Maybrook.”
“I do not; but it is no matter. I came to give Dorothy the grilse.”
“She is not at home. Let me take the basket. I will put it in the brook. Did you carry it?”
“I did. It weighs—I assure you—twenty pounds! I must see it bestowed.” And she followed him into the wood along a narrow path to a basin of brown water. The stream crawled forth here from under a fallen tamarack, and seemed to hesitate a little in the pool below. Then it gathered decision for flight, and leaped out, tripping across the tangled roots as it went. Carington laid the fish in the water, and two stones upon it.
“It is cooler here than outside,” he said. “Dorothy will be back in a little while.”
Then Rose, of a sudden remembering what she had said the day before as to this errand of hers, became at once conscious of being in the country of a pleasant enemy. Therefore she made a neutral remark as she looked about her:
“It is prettier a little way up, where the spring comes out under a rock.”
“I should like to see it, but I must go. I have no time to spare. I must go home. I have so much of nothing to do here, and there is nothing takes so much time as doing nothing!”