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This child-woman of the desert, with her wicked eyes and sweet mouth, made it a pantomime of love in its first timid beginnings, its fears and hesitations, its final self-abandon and rapture. Ahmara was a dangerous rival for a daughter of Europe with such a man as Richard Stanton.
"Yes, I remember well," and the rose deepened in her soft cheek, "so well the last time I saw you there." "Do you; I am glad you do not forget what I never shall," and he leaned forward, looking at her almost gravely. Vaura too, in her long look backward, had a tremulous softness in her expression, with a far-away look in the eyes, vividly recalling the lovely child-woman to his memory.
The child's large eyes seemed to light up the ugly shadows of the old-fashioned mushroom hat she wore, the soft bow of her mouth was like a little Love's, she bloomed with an angelic innocence, and in her straight sweet look was the unconscious question of a child-woman creature at the dawn of life. John Baird stood looking down at the heavenly, tender little face.
"Git down," he said sharply. "You don't act as if your hearin' or your manners was much to brag on." He felt awkward and embarrassed with this delicately bred, lovely child-woman in the, to him, wonderfully fine and fashionable dress. To hide his nervousness and to brave it out, he took the only way he knew, the only way shy people usually know the way of gruffness.
"It were him I wanted," she said hysterically, hugging her little dead burden. "The toad?" "Yep, he were all I had, him and Daddy, and Daddy Skinner air gone too." Then Tessibel forgot the student, and the forlorn red head with its burden of curls lay relaxed upon the lifeless Frederick, while the child-woman wept in abject loneliness.
The city man knew enough of the primitive code of the mountain people to understand that the presence of a man, especially a strange man, alone in the house with a young woman, was fraught with unpleasant possibilities. But, before he could speak, the child-woman had launched into a vivacious, if ungrammatical, explanation and story of what had occurred.
"How all that is best in womanhood," wrote the old man, with the enthusiasm which no time had reft from his hearty, healthful genius, "how all that is best in womanhood is here opening fast into flower from the bud of the infant's soul! The atmosphere seems to suit it, the child-woman in the child-world!"
Here was no delicate midget of a child-woman or boy-girl on a stallion, but a grand lady, as only a small woman can be grand on occasion. Taller in truth was she, as well as in seeming, than he had judged her, and as finely proportioned in her gown as in her swimming suit.
For two free, full weeks he meant to live like a child of the out-of-doors, and to draw a brimming supply of new energy from Mother Nature's never-failing breasts. Every moment was precious. As he neared the Gap, his winging thoughts flew ahead to Big Jerry's cabin and to the child-woman who had so attracted him a year before.
His reasoning was jesuitical beyond dispute, and yet he was not Spartan enough to strike this child-woman a quivering heart-stroke. Snass, too, was a perturbing factor in the problem. Little escaped his black eyes, and he spoke significantly. "No man cares to see his daughter married," he said to Smoke. "At least, no man of imagination. It hurts. The thought of it hurts, I tell you.
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