illness had never made them heavy, he was sure a lie had never made them
shift from their straight gaze for one short second. He had not seen
such eyes in cities!

And from careful contemplation of the eyes, he kept on with a careful
contemplation of the other beauties of his fair and unexpected pupil.
Her homespun gown, always ill-shaped and now unusually protuberant in
spots, unusually tight in others, because of its late wetting and
impromptu, partial drying, could not hide the sylvan grave of her
small-boned and lissome figure, just budding into womanhood. Her feet,
crossed on the ground, were as patrician in their nakedness as any
bluegrass belle's in satin slippers. Her ankles, scratched by casual
thorns and already beginning to blush brown from the June sun's ardent
kisses, were as delicate as any he had ever seen enmeshed in silken
hose. Her hands, long, slender, taper-fingered, actually dainty,
although brown and roughened by hard labor, were, it seemed to him,
better fitted for the fingering of a piano's keys than for the coarse
and heavy tasks to which he knew they must be well accustomed. He gazed
at her in veritable wonder. How had she blossomed, thus, here in this
wilderness?

"Where do you live?" he asked, interrupting their scholastic efforts.

"Up thar," she pointed, and, above, he could just see the top of a
mud-and-stick chimney rise above a crag between the trees.

"Have you brothers or sisters?"

"Ain't got nobody," she answered, and to her face there came a look of
keen resentment rather than of sorrow or of resignation. "I'm all th'