Part 3

"No?" he queried, flushed and breathless from the climb. "I wonder if there is anyone else for whom you wave red ribbons from your fortress!"

"Take it down, will you please?"

"Wait until I get three full breaths--then I will."

She went back to the log while he awkwardly untied the ribbon, rolled it up, in clumsy masculine fashion, and restored it to the wooden box in the hollow tree. "Aren't you cold?" he asked, as he sat down beside her.

"No--I'm too vividly alive to be cold, ever."

"But what's the use of being alive unless you can live?" he inquired, discontentedly.

She sighed and turned her face away. The colour vanished from her cheeks, the youth from her figure. Pensively, she gazed across the valley to the vineyard, where the black, knotted vines were blurred against the soil in the fast-gathering twilight. His eyes followed hers.

"I hate them," he said, passionately. "I wish I'd never seen a grape!"

"Were the children bad to-day?" she asked, irrelevantly.

"Of course. Aren't they always bad? What's the use of caging up fifty little imps and making 'em learn the multiplication table when they don't even aspire to the alphabet? Why should I have to teach 'em to read and write when they're determined not to learn? Why do I have to grow grapes when it would be the greatest joy of my life to know that I'd never have to see, touch, taste, or even smell another grape in this world or the next?"

She turned toward him. A late Winter sunset shimmered in the west like some pale, transparent cloth of gold hung from the walls of heaven, but the kindly light lent no beauty to her face. Rosemary's eyes were grey and lustreless, her hair ashen, and almost without colour. Her features were irregular and her skin dull and lifeless. She had not even the indefinable freshness that is the divine right of youth. Her mouth drooped wistfully at the corners, and even the half-discouraged dimple in her chin looked like a dent or a scar.

The bare hands that lay listlessly in her lap were rough and red from much uncongenial toil. He looked at her for a moment, still absorbed in himself, then, as he noted the pathos in every line of her face and figure, the expression of his face subtly changed. His hand closed quickly over hers.

"Forgive me, Rosemary--I'm a brute. I have no right to inflict my moods upon you."

"Why not? Don't I bring mine to you?"

"Sometimes--not often."

"Let's get them out where we can look them over," she suggested, practically. "What do you hate most?"

"Grapes," he replied, readily, "and then children who aren't interested in the alphabet. All day I've been saying: 'See the cat. Can the cat run? Yes, the cat can run.' Of course they could repeat it after me, but they couldn't connect it in any way with the printed page. I sympathised strongly with an unwashed child of philosophical German lineage who inquired, earnestly: 'Teacher, what's the good of dat?'"

"What else do you hate?"

"Being tied up. Set down in one little corner of the world and being obliged to stay in it. I know to a certainty just what's going to happen to-morrow and next day and the day after that. Point out any day on the calendar, months ahead, and I can tell you just what I'll be doing. Nothing is uncertain but the weather."

"Some people pray for anchorage," she said.

"I never have," he flashed back. "I want the open sea--tide and tempest and grey surges, with the wind in my face and the thrill of danger in my heart! I want my blood to race through my body; I want to be hungry, cold, despairing, afraid--everything! God, how I want to live!"

He paced back and forth restlessly, his hands in his pockets. Rosemary watched him, half afraid, though his mood was far from strange to her. He was taller than the average man, clean-shaven, and superbly built, with every muscle ready and even eager for use. His thirty years sat lightly upon him, though his dark hair was already slightly grey at the temples, for his great brown eyes were boyish and always would be. In the half-light, his clean-cut profile was outlined against the sky, and his mouth trembled perceptibly. He had neither the thin, colourless lips that would have made men distrust him, nor the thick lips that would have warned women to go slowly with him and to watch every step.

With obvious effort, he shook himself partially free of his mood. "What do you hate?" he asked, gently.

"Brown alpaca, sassafras tea, the eternal dishes, the scrubbing, the endless looking for dust where dust would never dare to stay, and--" She paused, and bit her lips.

"Might as well go on," he urged, with a smile.

"I can't. It isn't nice of me."

"But it's true. I don't know why you shouldn't hate your Grandmother and your Aunt Matilda. I do. It's better to be truthful than nice."

"Is it?"