Round Anvil Rock - A Romance by Nancy Huston Banks
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page 12 of 278 (04%)
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gayly. "There now, that will set you off thinking of your knights again!
But you must not. Truly, you must not. For it is quite true, dear; you are a dreamer, a poet. You do indeed belong to the Arcadian Hills. You should be there now, playing a gentle shepherd's pipe and herding his peaceful flocks. And instead--alas!"--she looked at him in perplexity which was partly real and partly assumed--"instead you are here in this awful wilderness, carrying a rifle longer and heavier than yourself, and trying to pretend that you like to kill wild beasts, or can endure to hurt any living thing." David said nothing; there seemed to be no response for him to make. When a well-grown youth of eighteen or thereabouts is spoken to by a girl near his own age as he had just been spoken to by Ruth, he rarely finds anything to say. No words could do justice to what he feels. And there is nothing for him to do either, unless it be to take refuge in a dignified silence which disdains the slightest notice of the offence. This was what David resorted to, and, bending down, he calmly and quietly raised his forgotten rifle from the ground to his shoulder. He did it very slowly and impressively, however, in the hope that Ruth might realize the fact that he had killed the buck whose huge horns made the rifle's rest on his cabin walls. But she saw and realized only that he was wounded, and instantly darted toward him like a swallow. She caught his rigid rifle arm and clung to it, looking up in his set face. Her blue eyes were already filling with tears while the smile was still on her lips. That was Ruth's way; her smiles and tears were even closer together than most women's are; she was nearly always quiveringly poised between gayety and sadness; like a living sunbeam continually glancing across life's shadows. "What is it, David, dear?" she pleaded, with her sweet lips close to his |
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