The Streets of Ascalon

"For yours."

He straightened up on his knees: "For mine?"

"Certainly."

"You didn't go wandering afield at this hour to pick wild strawberries for my breakfast!" he said incredulously.

"Yes, I did," said the girl; and continued exploring, parting the high grass-stems to feel for and detach some berry-loaded stem.

"Do you know," he said, returning to his labours, "that I am quite overcome by your thought of me?"

"Why? We are friends… And it is to be your last breakfast."

There was not the slightest tremor in her voice, but her pretty face was carefully turned away so that if there was to be anything to notice in the features he could not notice it.

"I'll miss you a lot," he said.

"And I you, Sir Charles."

"You'll be over, I suppose."

"I suppose so."

"That will be jolly," he said, sitting back on his heels to rest, and to watch her – to find pleasure in her youth and beauty as she moved gracefully amid the fragrant grasses, one little sun-tanned hand clasping a great bouquet of the crimson fruit which nodded heavily amid tufts of trefoil leaves.

In the barred shadow of the pasture-fence they rested from their exertions, she rearranging their bouquets of berries and tying them fast with grass-stems.

"It has been a pleasant comradeship," he said.

"Yes."

"You have found it so, too?"

"Yes."

She appeared to be so intent, so absorbed on her bouquet tying that he involuntarily leaned nearer to watch her. A fragrance faintly fresh seemed to grow in the air around him as the hill-breeze stirred her hair. If it came from the waving grass-tops, or the honeyed fruit or from her hair, or perhaps from those small, smooth hands, he did not know.

For a long while they sat there without speaking, she steadily intent on her tying. Then, while still busy with a cluster, her slim fingers hesitated, wavered, relaxed; her hands fell to her lap, and she remained so, head bent, motionless.

After a moment he spoke, but she made no answer.

Through and through him shot the thrilling comprehension of that exquisite avowal, childlike in its silent directness, charming in its surprise. A wave of tenderness and awe mounted within him, touching his bronzed cheeks with a deeper colour.

"If you will, Chrysos," he said in a still voice.

She lifted her head and looked directly at him, and in her questioning gaze there was nothing of fear – merely the question.

"I can't bear to have you go," she said.

"I can't go – alone."

"Could you – care for me?"

"I love you, Chrysos."

Her eyes widened in wonder:

"You – you don't love me – do you?"

"Yes," he said, "I do. Will you marry me, Chrysos?"

Her fascinated gaze met his in silence. He drew her close to his shoulder; she laid her cheek against it.

CHAPTER XV

Toward the end of the first week in August Strelsa wrote to Quarren:

"Sometimes I wonder whether you realise how my attitude toward everything is altering. Things which seemed important no longer appear so in the sunlit tranquillity of this lovely place. Whatever it is that seems to be changing me in various ways is doing it so subtly, yet so inexorably, that I scarcely notice any difference in myself until some morning I awake with such a delicious sense of physical well-being and such a mental happiness apropos of nothing at all except the mere awaking into the world again, that, thinking it over, I cannot logically account for it.

"Because, Rix, my worldly affairs seem to be going from bad to worse. I know it perfectly well, yet where is that deadly fear? – where is the dismay, the alternate hours of panic and dull lethargy – the shrinking from a future which only yesterday seemed to threaten me with more than I had strength to endure – menace me with what I had neither the will nor the desire to resist?

"Gone, my friend! And I am either a fool or a philosopher, but whichever I am, I am a happy one.

"I wish to tell you something. Last winter when they fished me out of my morbid seclusion, I thought that the life I then entered upon was the only panacea for the past, the only oblivion, the only guarantee for the future.

"Now I suppose I have gone to the other extreme, because, let me tell you what I've done. Will you laugh? I can't help it if you do; I've bought a house! What do you think of that?

"The owner took back a mortgage, but I don't care. I paid so very little for it, and thirty acres of woods and fields – and it is a darling house! – built in the eighteenth century and not in good repair, but it's mine! mine! mine! – and it may need paint and plumbing and all sorts of things which perhaps make for human happiness and perhaps do not. But I tell you I really don't care.

"And how I did it was this: I took what they offered for my laces and jewels – about a third of their value – but it paid every debt and left me with enough to buy my sweet old house up here.

"But that's not all! I've rented my town house furnished for a term of five years at seven thousand dollars a year! Isn't it wonderful?

"And that is not all, either. I am going into business, Rix! Don't dare laugh. Jim has made an arrangement with an independent New York florist, and I'm going to grow flowers under glass for the Metropolitan market.

"And, if I succeed, I may try fruits outdoors and in. My small brain is humming with schemes, millions of them. Isn't it heavenly?

"Besides, from my second-story windows I shall be able to see Molly's chimneys above the elms. And Molly is going to remain here all winter, because, Rix – and this is a close secret – a little heir or heiress is coming to make this House of Wycherly 'an habitation enforced' – and a happier habitation than it has been since they bought it.

"So you see I shall have neighbours all winter – two neighbours, for Mrs. Ledwith is wretchedly ill and her physicians have advised her to remain here all winter. Poor child – for she is nothing else, Rix – I met her for the first time when I went to call on Mrs. Sprowl. She's so young and so empty-headed, just a shallow, hare-brained, little thing who had no more moral idea of sin than a humming-bird – nor perhaps has she any now except that the world has hurt her and broken her wings and damaged her plumage; and the sunlight in which she sparkled for a summer has faded to a chill gray twilight! – Oh, Rix, it is really pitiful; and somehow I can't seem to remember whether she was guilty or not, because she's so ill, so broken – lying here amid the splendour of her huge house —

"You know Mrs. Sprowl is on her way to Carlsbad. You haven't written me what took place in your last interview with her; and I've asked you, twice. Won't you tell me?

"Langly, thank goodness, never disturbs us. And, Rix, do you know that he has never been to call on Mary Ledwith? He keeps to his own estate and nobody even sees him. Which is all I ask at any rate.

"So Sir Charles called on you and told you about Chrysos? Isn't Sir Charles the most darling man you ever knew? I never knew such a man. There is not one atom of anything small or unworthy in his character. And I tell you very frankly that, thinking about him at times, I am amazed at myself for not falling in love with him.

"Which is proof sufficient that if I couldn't care for him I cannot ever care for any man. Don't you think so?