“What did you once say you wished you had in your boat?” she asked.
“Was it long ago?” I inquired, at a loss for an answer.
“Long, long ago! Before the winter. When the autumn leaves were falling, and you took me out one evening for a sail. Ah, George, you have forgotten!”
Too true, of me and of my brethren, old and young alike! It is always his love that forgets, and her love that remembers. We were only two children, and we were types of the man and the woman already.
Mary lost patience with me. Forgetting the terrible presence of her grandmother, she jumped up, and snatched the concealed object out of her handkerchief.
“There!” she cried, briskly, “now do you know what it is?”
I remembered at last. The thing I had wished for in my boat, all those months ago, was a new flag. And here was the flag, made for me in secret by Mary’s own hand! The ground was green silk, with a dove embroidered on it in white, carrying in its beak the typical olive-branch, wrought in gold thread. The work was the tremulous, uncertain work of a child’s fingers. But how faithfully my little darling had remembered my wish! how patiently she had plied the needle over the traced lines of the pattern! how industriously she had labored through the dreary winter days! and all for my sake! What words could tell my pride, my gratitude, my happiness?
I too forgot the presence of the Sibyl bending over her book. I took the little workwoman in my arms, and kissed her till I was fairly out of breath and could kiss no longer.
“Mary!” I burst out, in the first heat of my enthusiasm, “my father is coming home to-day. I will speak to him to-night. And I will marry you to-morrow!”
“Boy!” said the awful voice at the other end of the room. “Come here.”
Dame Dermody’s mystic book was closed; Dame Dermody’s weird black eyes were watching us in our corner. I approached her; and Mary followed me timidly, by a footstep at a time.
The Sibyl took me by the hand, with a caressing gentleness which was new in my experience of her.
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