She stood under
his tree unheeded; but as they rose abreast of him the girl paused and
dropped her companion's arm.
"Look! The cherry flowers!" she cried, and stretched her arms to a white
gush of blossoms above the wall across the road. The movement tilted
back her hat, and Odo caught her small fine profile, wide-browed as the
head on some Sicilian coin, with a little harp-shaped ear bedded in dark
ripples.
"Oh," she wailed, straining on tiptoe, "I can't reach them!"
Her father smiled. "May temptation," said he philosophically, "always
hang as far out of your reach."
"Temptation?" she echoed.
"Is it not theft you're bent on?"
"Theft? This is a monk's orchard, not a peasant's plot."
"Confiscation, then," he humorously conceded.
"Since they pay no taxes on their cherries they might at least," she
argued, "spare a few to us poor taxpayers."
"Ah," said her father, "I want to tax their cherries, not to gather
them." He slipped a hand through her arm. "Come, child," said he, "does
not the philosopher tell us that he who enjoys a thing possesses it? The
flowers are yours already!"
"Oh, are they?" she retorted. "Then why doesn't the loaf in the baker's
window feed the beggar that looks in at it?"
"Casuist!" he cried and drew her up the bend of the road.
Odo stood gazing after them. Their words, their aspect, seemed an echo
of his reading. The father in his plain broadcloth and square-buckled
shoes, the daughter with her unpowdered hair and spreading hat, might
have stepped from the pages of the romance.
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