Audrey

Audrey flushed with pride that she could tell him that she was not

ignorant; not like Barbara, who could not read the giant's name in the

pilgrim book.

"The crossroads schoolmaster taught me," she explained. "He has a scar in

each hand, and is a very wicked man, but he knows more than the Commissary

himself. The minister, too, has a cupboard filled with books, and he buys

the new ones as the ships bring them in. When I have time, and Mistress

Deborah will not let me go to the woods, I read. And I remember what I

read. I could"-A smile trembled upon her lips, and her eyes grew brighter. Fired by the

desire that he should praise her learning, and in her very innocence bold

as a Wortley or a Howe, she began to repeat the lines which he had been

reading beneath the cherry-tree:

"'When from the censer clouds of fragrance roll'"

The rhythm of the words, the passion of the thought, the pleased surprise

that she thought she read in his face, the gesture of his hand, all

spurred her on from line to line, sentence to sentence. And now she was

not herself, but that other woman, and she was giving voice to all her

passion, all her woe. The room became a convent cell; her ragged dress the

penitent's trailing black. That Audrey, lithe of mind as of body; who in

the woods seemed the spirit of the woods, in the garden the spirit of the

garden, on the water the spirit of the water,--that this Audrey, in using

the speech of the poet, should embody and become the spirit of that speech

was perhaps, considering all things, not so strange. At any rate, and

however her power came about, at that moment, in Fair View house, a great

actress was speaking.

"'Fresh blooming Hope, gay daughter of the skies,

And Faith'"-The speaker lost a word, hesitated, became confused. Finally silence;

then the Audrey of a while before, standing with heaving bosom, shy as a

fawn, fearful that she had not pleased him, after all. For if she had done

so, surely he would have told her as much. As it was, he had said but one

word, and that beneath his breath, "Eloïsa!"

It would seem that her fear was unfounded; for when he did speak, there

were, God wot, sugar-plums enough. And Audrey, who in her workaday world

was always blamed, could not know that the praise that was so sweet was

less wholesome than the blame.