Winsome disdained an answer, but stood to her own tub, where some of the lighter articles--pillow-slips, and fair sheets of "seventeen-hundred" linen were waiting her daintier hand.
As Winsome and Meg washed, Ralph Peden carried water, learning the wondrous science of carrying two cans over a wooden hoop; and in the frankest tutelage Winsome put her hand over his to teach him, and the relation of master and pupil asserted its ancient danger.
It had not happened to Winsome Charteris to meet any one to whom she was attracted with such frank liking. She had never known what it was to have a brother, and she thought that this clear-eyed young man might be a brother to her. It is a fallacy common among girls that young men desire them as sisters. Ralph himself was under no such illusion, or at least would not have been, had he had the firmness of mind to sit down half a mile from his emotions and coolly look them over. But in the meanwhile he was only conscious of a great and rising delight in his heart.
As Winsome Charteris bent above the wash-tub he was at liberty to observe how the blood mantled on the clear oval of her cheek. He had time to note--of course entirely as a philosopher--the pale purple shadow under the eyes, over which the dark, curling lashes came down like the fringe of the curtain of night.
"Why--I wonder why?" he said, and stopped aghast at his utterance aloud of his inmost thought.
"What do you wonder?" said Winsome, glancing up with a frank dewy freshness in her eyes.
"I wonder why--I wonder that you are able to do all this work," he said, with an attempt to turn the corner of his blunder.
Winsome shook her head.
"Now you are trying to be like other people," she said; "I do not think you will succeed. That was not what you were going to say. If you are to be my friend, you must speak all the truth to me and speak it always." A thing which, indeed, no man does to a woman. And, besides, nobody had spoken of Ralph Peden being a friend to her. The meaning was that their hearts had been talking while their tongues had spoken of other things; and though there was no thought of love in the breast of Winsome Charteris, already in the intercourse of a single morning she had given this young Edinburgh student of divinity a place which no other had ever attained to. Had she had a brother, she thought, what would he not have been to her? She felt specially fitted to have a brother. It did not occur to her to ask whether she would have carried her brother's college note-book, even by accident, where it could be stirred by the beating of her heart.