Here was a stab; but she did not notice the effect of her unfinished sentence. Then a question came from me involuntarily.
'Winifred,' I said, 'do you like him as well as you like me?'
'Oh no,' she said, in a tone of wonderment that such a question should be asked.
'Oh, but you _are_!' she said eagerly, interrupting me.
'But,' I said, with a choking sensation in my voice, 'I am lame.' and I looked at the crutches lying among the ferns beside me.
'Ah, but I like you all the better for being lame,' she said, nestling up to me.
'But you like nimble boys,' I said, 'such as Frank.'
She looked puzzled. The anomaly of liking nimble boys and crippled boys at the same time seemed to strike her. Yet she felt it _was_ so, though it was difficult to explain it.
'Yes, I _do_ like nimble boys,' she said at last, plucking with her fingers at a blade of grass she held between her teeth. 'But I think I like lame boys better, that is if they are--if they are--_you_.'
I gave an exclamation of delight. But she was two years younger than I, and scarcely, I suppose, understood it.
'He is very pretty,' she said meditatively, 'but he has not got love-eyes like you and Snap, and I don't think I could love any little boy so very, _very_ much now who wasn't lame.'
She loved me in spite of my lameness; she loved me because I was lame, so that if I had not fallen from the cliffs, if I had sustained my glorious position among the boys of Raxton and Graylingham as 'Fighting Hal.' I might never have won little Winifred's love. Here was a revelation of the mingled yarn of life, that I remember struck me even at that childish age.
I began to think I might, in spite of the undoubted crutches, resume my old place as the luckiest boy along the sands. She loved me because I was lame! Those who say that physical infirmity does not feminise the character have not had my experience. No more talk for me that morning. In such a mood as that there can be no talk. I sat in a silent dream, save when a sweet sob of delight would come up like a bubble from the heaving waters of my soul. I had passed into that rare and high mood when life's afflictions are turned by love to life's deepest, holiest joys. I had begun early to learn and know the gamut of the affections.