“Roll on, proud porpoise!” she rejoined,
which shows that her conversation was not quite aristocratic
at all times.
“Golly, but she’s a gold dollar in a gold
bank,” remarked Jesse Bulrush warmly as he lurched
into the street.
The girl stood still in the middle of the room looking
dreamily down the way the two men had gone.
The quiet of the late summer day surrounded her.
She heard the dizzy din of the bees, the sleepy grinding
of the grass hoppers, the sough of the solitary pine
at the door, and then behind them all a whizzing,
machine-like sound. This particular sound went
on and on.
She opened the door of the next room. Her mother
sat at a sewing-machine intent upon some work, the
needle eating up a spreading piece of cloth.
“What are you making, mother?” Kitty asked.
“New blinds for Mr. Kerry’s bedroom-he
likes this green colour,” the widow added with
a slight flush, due to leaning over the sewing-machine,
no doubt.
“Everybody does everything for him,” remarked
the girl almost pettishly.
“That’s a nice spirit, I must say!”
replied her mother reprovingly, the machine almost
stopping.
“If I said it in a different way it would be
all right,” the other returned with a smile,
and she repeated the words with a winning soft inflection,
like a born actress.
“Kitty-Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!”
declared her mother, and she bent smiling over the
machine, which presently buzzed on its devouring way.
Three people had said the same thing within a few minutes.
A look of pleasure stole over the girl’s face,
and her bosom rose and fell with a happy sigh.
Somehow it was quite a wonderful day for her.
CLOSING THE DOORS
There are many people who, in some subtle psychological
way, are very like their names; as though some one
had whispered to “the parents of this child”
the name designed for it from the beginning of time.
So it was with Shiel Crozier. Does not the name
suggest a man lean and flat, sinewy, angular and isolated
like a figure in one of El Greco’s pictures
in the Prado at Madrid? Does not the name suggest
a figure of elongated humanity with a touch of ancient
mysticism and yet also of the fantastical humour of
Don Quixote?
In outward appearance Shiel Crozier, otherwise J.
G. Kerry, of Askatoon, was like his name for the greater
part of the time. Take him in repose, and he
looked a lank ascetic who dreamed of a happy land where
flagellation was a joy and pain a panacea. In
action, however, as when Kitty Tynan helped him on
with his coat, he was a pure improvisation of nature.
He had a face with a Cromwellian mole, which broke
out in emotion like an April day, with eyes changing
from a blue-grey to the deepest ultramarine that ever
delighted the soul and made the reputation of an Old
Master. Even in the prairie town of Askatoon,
