The Heart

That morning Mistress Mary glowed and glittered and flamed in

gorgeous apparel, until she seemed to fairly overreach all the

innocent young flowery beauties of the spring with one rich trill of

colour, like a high note of a bird above a wide chorus of others.

Mistress Mary that morning wore a tabby petticoat of a crimson

colour, and a crimson satin bodice shining over her arms and

shoulders like the plumage of a bird, and down her back streamed her

curls, shining like gold under her gauze love-hood. I knew well how

she had sat up late the night before fashioning that hood from one

which her friend Cicely Hyde's grandmother had sent her from

England, and I knew, the first pages of a young maid being easy to

spell out, that she wondered if I, though only her tutor, approved

her in it, but I gave no sign. The love-hood was made of such thin

and precious stuff that the gold of her head showed through.

Mistress Mary wore a mask of black velvet to screen her face from

the sun, and only her sweet forehead and her great blue eyes and the

rose-leaf tip of her chin showed.

All that low, swampy country was lush and green that April morning,

with patches of grass gleaming like emeralds in the wetness of

sunken places and unexpected pools of marsh water gleaming out of

the distances like sapphires. The blossoms thrust out toward us from

every hand like insistent arms of beauty. There was a frequent bush

by the wayside full of a most beautiful pink-horned flower, so

exceeding sweet that it harmed the worth of its own sweetness, and

its cups seemed fairly dripping with honey and were gummed together

with it. There were patches of a flower of a most brilliant and

wonderful blue colour, and spreads as of cloth of gold from cowslips

over the lowlands. The road was miry in places, and then I would

fall behind her farther still that the water and red mud splashing

from beneath my horse's hoofs might not reach her. Then, finally,

after I had done thus some few times, she reined in her Merry Roger,

and looked over her shoulder with a flash of her blue eyes which

compelled mine.

"Why do you ride so far away, Master Wingfield?" said she.

I lifted my hat and bent so low in my saddle that the feather on it

grazed the red mud.

"Because I fear to splash your fine tabby petticoat, Madam," I

answered.

"I care not for my fine petticoat," said she in a petulant way, like

that of a spoiled child who is forbidden sweets and the moon, and

questions love in consequence, yet still there was some little fear

and hesitation in her tone. Mistress Mary was a most docile pupil,

seeming to have great respect for my years and my learning, and was

as gentle under my hand as was her Merry Roger under hers, and yet

with the same sort of gentleness, which is as the pupil and not as

the master decides, and let the pull of the other will be felt.