The Heart

Catherine Cavendish I had seen afar, though not to speak with her,

and she being a year my senior and not then a beauty, and I being,

moreover, of an age to look at a girl and look away again to my own

affairs, I had thought no more of her, but I knew her at once. She

was, as I said before, not a beauty at that time, being one of those

maids which, like some flowers, are slow of bloom. She had grown so

fast and far that she had outspeeded her grace. She was full of

triangles instead of curves; her shyness was so intense that it

became aggressiveness. The greenness and sallowness of immaturity

that come before the perfection of bloom were on her face, and her

eyes either shrank before one or else gleamed fiercely with the

impulse of concealment. There is in all youth and imperfection a

stage wherein it turns at bay to protect its helplessness with a

vain show of inadequate claws and teeth, and Catherine Cavendish had

reached it, and I also, in my different estate as a boy.

Catherine towered over me with her slender height, her sallow hair

falling in silky ringlets over her dull cheeks, and when she spoke

her voice rang sharp where mine would have growled with hoarseness.

"Why did you not tell?" said she sharply, and I stared up at her

speechless, for I saw that she knew.

"Why did you not tell, and why were you whipped for it?" she

demanded again. Then, when I did not answer: "I saw it all. I hid

behind a tree for fear of the stallion. The child would have been

killed but for you. Why were you whipped for a thing like that?"

Then all at once, before I could answer, had I been minded to do so,

she burst out almost with violence with a brilliant red, surging up

from the cords of her thin neck, over her whole face. "Never mind, I

like you for it. I would not have told. I will never tell as long as

I live, and I have brought some lotion of cream and healing herbs,

and a linen cloth, and I will bind up your shoulder for you."

With that, down she was on her knees, though I strove half rudely to

prevent her, and was binding up my shoulder with a wonderful

deftness of her long fingers.

When she had done she sprang to her feet with a curious multifold

undoubling motion by reason of her great height and lack of practice

with it, and I lumbered heavily to mine, and she asked me again with

a sharpness that seemed almost venomous, so charged with curiosity

it was, though she had just expressed her approbation of me: "Why did you not tell?"