Brown moccasins, red stockings and
a quantity of bright beads completed her costume.
"By Jove!" cried Edward, "the little thing is almost pretty."
Felipa understood this, and a great light came into her face: forgetting
her pose, she bounded forward to Christine's side. "I am pretty, then?"
she said with exultation: "I _am_ pretty, then, after all? For now you
yourself have said it--have said it."
"No, Felipa," I interposed, "the gentleman said it." For the child had a
curious habit of confounding the two identities which puzzled me then as
now. But this afternoon, this happy afternoon, she was content, for she
was allowed to sit at Christine's feet and look up into her fair face
unmolested. I was forgotten, as usual.
"It is always so," I said to myself. But cynicism, as Mr. Aldrich says,
is a small brass field-piece that eventually bursts and kills the
artilleryman. I knew this, having been blown up myself more than once;
so I went back to my painting and forgot the world. Our world down there
on the edge of the salt marsh, however, was a small one: when two
persons went out of it there was a vacuum at once.
One morning Felipa came sadly to my side. "They have gone away,'" she
said.
"Yes, child."
"Down to the beach to spend all the day."
"Yes, I know it."
"And without me!"
This was the climax. I looked up. The child's eyes were dry, but there
was a hollow look of disappointment in her face that made her seem old:
it was as though for an instant you caught what her old-woman face would
be half a century on.
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