to show my hurt, though I knew well that my mother, being a woman and soft toward all wounds, would make much of it, and maybe of me on its account.  But I was not of a mind to purchase affection by complaints of bodily ills, so I lay down under the hedge in the soft grass, keeping my bruised shoulder uppermost, and remained there thinking of the little maid, till finally the pain easing somewhat, I fell asleep, and was presently awakened by a soft touch on my sore shoulder, which caused me to wince and start up with wide eyes, and there was Catherine Cavendish.

Catherine Cavendish I had seen afar, though not to speak with her, and she being a year my senior and not then a beauty, and I being, moreover, of an age to look at a girl and look away again to my own affairs, I had thought no more of her, but I knew her at once.  She was, as I said before, not a beauty at that time, being one of those maids which, like some flowers, are slow of bloom.  She had grown so fast and far that she had outspeeded her grace.  She was full of triangles instead of curves; her shyness was so intense that it became aggressiveness.  The greenness and sallowness of immaturity that come before the perfection of bloom were on her face, and her eyes either shrank before one or else gleamed fiercely with the impulse of concealment.  There is in all youth and imperfection a stage wherein it turns at bay to protect its helplessness with a vain show of inadequate claws and teeth, and Catherine Cavendish had reached it, and I also, in my different estate as a boy.

Catherine towered over me with her slender height, her sallow hair falling in silky ringlets over her dull cheeks, and when she spoke her voice rang sharp where mine would have growled with hoarseness.

“Why did you not tell?” said she sharply, and I stared up at her speechless, for I saw that she knew.

“Why did you not tell, and why were you whipped for it?” she demanded again.  Then, when I did not answer:  “I saw it all.  I hid behind a tree for fear of the stallion.  The child would have been killed but for you.  Why were you whipped for a thing like that?” Then all at once, before I could answer, had I been minded to do so, she burst out almost with violence with a brilliant red, surging up from the cords of her thin neck, over her whole face.  “Never mind, I like you for it.  I would not have told.  I will never tell as long as I live, and I have brought some lotion of cream and healing herbs, and a linen cloth, and I will bind up your shoulder for you.”

With that, down she was on her knees, though I strove half rudely to prevent her, and was binding up my shoulder with a wonderful deftness of her long fingers.

When she had done she sprang to her feet with a curious multifold undoubling motion by reason of her great height and lack of practice with it, and I lumbered heavily to mine, and she asked me again with a sharpness that seemed almost venomous, so charged with curiosity it was, though she had just expressed her approbation of me: