Her complexion was perfect, even
though her face was pale and jaded, and her eyes heavy, consequent upon
her long, weary journey from the now frozen North.
Presently, when by signs both Jack and Olinto had urged her to write,
she bent suddenly, and her pencil began to run swiftly over the paper.
All of us stood exchanging glances in silence, neither looking over her,
but each determined to wait in patience until the end. Once started,
however, she did not pause. Sheet after sheet she covered. The silence
for a long time was complete, broken only by the rapid running of the
pencil over the rough surface of the paper. She had apparently become
seized by a sudden determination to explain everything, now that she saw
we were in real, dead earnest.
I watched her sweet face bent so intently, and as the firelight fell
across it found it incomparable. Yes; she was afflicted by loss of
speech, it was true, yet she was surely inexpressibly sweet and womanly,
peerless above all others.
With a deep-drawn sigh she at last finished, and, her head still bowed
in an attitude of humiliation, it seemed, she handed what she had
written to me.
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