Then she took his sketching-easel and brushes from his hand, and would
have kneeled and taken the dust off his boots if he would have let her;
and went hither and thither gladly and lightly, bringing him a wooden
bowl of milk and the rest of the slender fare, and cutting as quick as
thought fresh cresses and lettuce from her garden, and bringing him, as
the crown of all, Father Francis's honey-comb on vine-leaves, with some
pretty sprays of box and mignonette scattered about it--doing all this
with a swift, sweet grace that robbed the labor of all look of servitude,
and looking at him ever and again with a smile that said as clearly as
any words, "I cannot do much, but what I do, I do with all my heart."
There was something in the sight of her going and coming in those simple
household errands, across the sunlit floor, that moved him as some
mountain air sung on an alp by a girl driving her cows to pasture may
move a listener who indifferent has heard the swell of the organ of
La Hague, or the recitative of a great singer in San Carlo.
The gray lavender blowing at the house door has its charm for those who
are tired of the camellias that float in the porcelain bowls of midnight
suppers.
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