Eric smiled; but the puzzled look returned to his
face many times that evening. He walked home
in a brown study. Kilmeny’s case certainly
seemed a strange one, and the more he thought of it
the stranger it seemed.
“It strikes me as something very peculiar that
she should be able to make sounds only when she is
not thinking about it,” he reflected.
“I wish David Baker could examine her.
But I suppose that is out of the question. That
grim pair who have charge of her would never consent.”
For the next three weeks Eric Marshall seemed to himself
to be living two lives, as distinct from each other
as if he possessed a double personality. In
one, he taught the Lindsay district school diligently
and painstakingly; solved problems; argued on theology
with Robert Williamson; called at the homes of his
pupils and took tea in state with their parents; went
to a rustic dance or two and played havoc, all unwittingly,
with the hearts of the Lindsay maidens.
But this life was a dream of workaday. He only
lived in the other, which was spent in an old
orchard, grassy and overgrown, where the minutes seemed
to lag for sheer love of the spot and the June winds
made wild harping in the old spruces.
Here every evening he met Kilmeny; in that old orchard
they garnered hours of quiet happiness together; together
they went wandering in the fair fields of old romance;
together they read many books and talked of many things;
and, when they were tired of all else, Kilmeny played
to him and the old orchard echoed with her lovely,
fantastic melodies.
At every meeting her beauty came home afresh to him
with the old thrill of glad surprise. In the
intervals of absence it seemed to him that she could
not possibly be as beautiful as he remembered her;
and then when they met she seemed even more so.
He learned to watch for the undisguised light of welcome
that always leaped into her eyes at the sound of his
footsteps. She was nearly always there before
him and she always showed that she was glad to see
him with the frank delight of a child watching for
a dear comrade.
She was never in the same mood twice. Now she
was grave, now gay, now stately, now pensive.
But she was always charming. Thrawn and twisted
the old Gordon stock might be, but it had at least
this one offshoot of perfect grace and symmetry.
Her mind and heart, utterly unspoiled of the world,
were as beautiful as her face. All the ugliness
of existence had passed her by, shrined in her double
solitude of upbringing and muteness.
She was naturally quick and clever. Delightful
little flashes of wit and humour sparkled out occasionally.
She could be whimsical—even charmingly
capricious. Sometimes innocent mischief glimmered
out in the unfathomable deeps of her blue eyes.
Sarcasm, even, was not unknown to her. Now and
then she punctured some harmless bubble of a young
man’s conceit or masculine superiority with
a biting little line of daintily written script.
