Only one love : $b or, Who was the heirGarvice, Charles
General
Only one love : $b or, Who was the heir
Garvice, Charles
Dime novels; English fiction
"Yes," she said; "I should like you to. Yes, that would be very nice. We
could sit and talk when your work was done, and I could show you all the
prettiest spots, and the places where the starlings make their nests,
and the fairy rings in the glades, and you could tell me all that you
have seen and done. Yes," wistfully, "that would be very nice. It is so
lonely sometimes!"
"Lonely, is it?" he said. "Lonely! By George, I should think it must be!
I can't realize it! Books, it reads like a book. If I were to tell some
of my friends that there was a young lady shut up in a forest, outside
of which she had never been, they wouldn't believe me. By the way--where
did you go to school?"
"School? I never went to school."
"Then how--how did you learn to read? and--it's awfully rude of me, you
know, but you speak so nicely; such grammar, and all that."
"Do I?" she said, thoughtfully. "I didn't know that I did. My father
taught me."
"It's hard to believe," he said, as if he were giving up a conundrum. "I
beg your pardon. I mean that your father would have made a jolly good
schoolmaster, and I must be an awful dunce, for I've been to Oxford, and
I'll wager I don't know half what you do, and as to talking--I am not
in it."
"Yes, my father is very clever," she said; "he is not like the other
woodmen and burners."
"No, if he is, they must be a learned lot," assented Jack; "yes, I think
I had better come and live here, and get him to teach me. I'm afraid he
wouldn't undertake the job."
"Father does not like strangers," she said, blushing as she thought of
the inhospitable scene of the preceding night. "He says that the world
is a cruel, wicked place, and that everybody is unhappy there. But I
think he must be wrong. You don't look unhappy."
"I am not unhappy now," said Jack.
"I am so glad," she said; "why are you not?"
"Because I am with you."
"Are you?" she said, gently. "Then it must be because I am with you that
I feel so happy."
The Savage flushed and he looked down, striving to still the sudden
throb of pleasure with which his heart beat.
"Confound it," he muttered, "I must go! I can't be such a cad as to stop
any longer; she oughtn't to say this sort of thing, and yet I--I can't
tell her so! No! I must go!" and he rose and took out his watch.
"I am afraid I must be on the tramp."
"Yes," she assented; "you have stayed too long. I hope you will find
that the Squire Davenant has forgiven you. I think he cannot help it.
And you will have your fortune and will go back into the world, and will
quite forget that you lost your way in Warden Forest. But I shall not
forget it; I shall often think of it."
"No," he said, "I shan't forget it. But in case I should, will you give
me something--no, I won't ask it."
"Why not?" she said, wonderingly. "Were you going to say, will I give
you something to help you to remember?"
"Yes, I will. What shall I give you?" and she looked around.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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