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"Never in all my travels, methinks, have I seen aught before like this your island here! It seems to me indeed a charmed land, a kind of magic isle!" One day it rained, the last belated rain of winter. But even the storm brought pleasures of its own, for, seated on the pile of skins beside him, the little gray fox curled contentedly at her feet, Wildenai worked at her loom.
But it's this way. I want to see your work. And, if I like it, I'll pay you well. And anyway, I'll pay every bit of the expense while you finish your series here if you'll tell me what you know about Wildenai!" But, at the name, the girl beside him had given a low cry of utter amazement. She stopped short. "Do you know it too, then?" she gasped. "How did you hear about it?"
He still looked as though he wanted to laugh, yet something in his tone seared her outraged pride. He might as well have touched an iron to quivering flesh. "You ought to remember, however, I mean every woman ought to remember, that when a girl lets a man know that she cares for him she generally forfeits, then and there, whatever interest she may have had for him. Wildenai risked too much.
Without surprise he saw his daughter enter and, as she knelt upon the blanket beside him, he stretched a hand and drew her close. "It grows cold. The wind is rising. 'Twere best to wait inside." He spoke in the musical Indian tongue. For a moment he stroked her hair in silence, then "What think'st thou by now of the English, Wildenai, my little wild rose?" he asked.
"They are low and crooked, and they spread themselves over the ground as do our English oaks," the young nobleman informed her. As Wildenai had promised they discovered, poised high among the crags of the wild southern shore, the great eagles of which she had told him, measuring easily, from wing-tip to wing-tip, fully a dozen feet.
Hurrying along the beach at sunset only a few days later, Wildenai caught the first glimpse of the returning vessel as it stole around a distant point. For the space of a second her heart stood still, then throbbed wildly, but whether with joy or pain she could not herself have told. One question only demanded all her thought. Should she let Lord Harold know?
This, having quickly dressed it, she wrapped again in leaves and placed under the hot ashes to bake, and it being, evidently, a feast out of the ordinary, a merry-making to which a third guest might be bidden, suddenly Wildenai left the cavern again to return this time with a tiny gray fox perched familiarly upon her shoulder.
At length the old chief spoke again, and now in his voice love conquered disappointment. "Much do I desire it, but that matters not. I would not have thee unhappy. I myself will tell the senor that what he hopes for cannot be." Slowly Wildenai bent her head until it touched his feet. Then she nestled close against him.
"And by and by, after a long, long time, one of these good, loyal, American citizens that we're both so proud of had a hot-tempered, most disloyal little daughter who intends to show her employer his proper place before she dismisses him! But why are you sorry for Wildenai?" With mischievous eyes he searched her face.
Then, noting her puzzled, downcast face, with the impulsive changeableness which had so endeared him to her, he caught one little brown hand and raised it to his lips. "But I do love thee even as thou art, my Wildenai," he told her with the careless assurance of one much older speaking to a child. "Is not a wild rose sweet as any garden bloom? Nay, methinks 'tis often sweeter!"
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