"
The baron struck an extravagant attitude and pointed down at Frona's
foot. "Ah! the water, it is gone, and there, a jewel of the flood, a
pearl of price!"
Her well-worn moccasins had gone rotten from the soaking, and a little
white toe peeped out at the world of slime.
"Then I am indeed wealthy, baron; for I have nine others."
"And who shall deny? who shall deny?" he cried, fervently.
"What a ridiculous, foolish, lovable fellow it is!"
"I kiss your hand." And he knelt gallantly in the muck.
She jerked her hand away, and, burying it with its mate in his curly
mop, shook his head back and forth. "What shall I do with him, father?"
Jacob Welse shrugged his shoulders and laughed; and she turned
Courbertin's face up and kissed him on the lips. And Jacob Welse knew
that his was the larger share in that manifest joy.
The river, fallen to its winter level, was pounding its ice-glut
steadily along. But in falling it had rimmed the shore with a
twenty-foot wall of stranded floes. The great blocks were spilled
inland among the thrown and standing trees and the slime-coated flowers
and grasses like the titanic vomit of some Northland monster. The sun
was not idle, and the steaming thaw washed the mud and foulness from
the bergs till they blazed like heaped diamonds in the brightness, or
shimmered opalescent-blue.
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