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Title: Kilmeny of the Orchard

Author: Lucy Maud Montgomery

Release Date: March, 2004 [EBook #5341]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on July 2, 2002]
[Date last updated: October 8, 2004]

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KILMENY OF THE ORCHARD

By L. M. MONTGOMERY

Author of "Anne's House of Dreams," "Rainbow Valley," "Rilla of
Ingleside," etc.

TO MY COUSIN
Beatrice A. McIntyre
THIS BOOK
IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED


        "Kilmeny looked up with a lovely grace,
        But nae smile was seen on Kilmeny's face;
        As still was her look, and as still was her ee,
        As the stillness that lay on the emerant lea,
        Or the mist that sleeps on a waveless sea.
        .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .
        Such beauty bard may never declare,
        For there was no pride nor passion there;
        .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .
        Her seymar was the lily flower,
        And her cheek the moss-rose in the shower;
        And her voice like the distant melodye
        That floats along the twilight sea."

                                  -- _The Queen's Wake_
                                                 JAMES HOGG



CONTENTS

     I. The Thoughts of Youth
    II. A Letter of Destiny
   III. The Master of Lindsay School
    IV. A Tea Table Conversation
     V. A Phantom of Delight
    VI. The Story of Kilmeny
   VII. A Rose of Womanhood
  VIII. At the Gate of Eden
    IX. The Straight Simplicity of Eve
     X. A Troubling of the Waters
    XI. A Lover and His Lass
   XII. A Prisoner of Love
  XIII. A Sweeter Woman Ne'er Drew Breath
   XIV. In Her Selfless Mood
    XV. An Old, Unhappy, Far-off Thing
   XVI. David Baker's Opinion
  XVII. A Broken Fetter
 XVIII. Neil Gordon Solves His Own Problem
   XIX. Victor from Vanquished Issues



KILMENY OF THE ORCHARD



CHAPTER I. THE THOUGHTS OF YOUTH

The sunshine of a day in early spring, honey pale and honey
sweet, was showering over the red brick buildings of Queenslea
College and the grounds about them, throwing through the bare,
budding maples and elms, delicate, evasive etchings of gold and
brown on the paths, and coaxing into life the daffodils that were
peering greenly and perkily up under the windows of the co-eds'
dressing-room.

A young April wind, as fresh and sweet as if it had been blowing
over the fields of memory instead of through dingy streets, was
purring in the tree-tops and whipping the loose tendrils of the
ivy network which covered the front of the main building.  It was
a wind that sang of many things, but what it sang to each
listener was only what was in that listener's heart.  To the
college students who had just been capped and diplomad by "Old
Charlie," the grave president of Queenslea, in the presence of an
admiring throng of parents and sisters, sweethearts and friends,
it sang, perchance, of glad hope and shining success and high
achievement.  It sang of the dreams of youth that may never be
quite fulfilled, but are well worth the dreaming for all that.
God help the man who has never known such dreams--who, as he
leaves his alma mater, is not already rich in aerial castles, the
proprietor of many a spacious estate in Spain.  He has missed his
birthright.

The crowd streamed out of the entrance hall and scattered over
the campus, fraying off into the many streets beyond. Eric
Marshall and David Baker walked away together.  The former had
graduated in Arts that day at the head of his class; the latter
had come to see the graduation, nearly bursting with pride in
Eric's success.

Between these two was an old and tried and enduring friendship,
although David was ten years older than Eric, as the mere tale of
years goes, and a hundred years older in knowledge of the
struggles and difficulties of life which age a man far more
quickly and effectually than the passing of time.

Physically the two men bore no resemblance to one another,
although they were second cousins.  Eric Marshall, tall,
broad-shouldered, sinewy, walking with a free, easy stride, which
was somehow suggestive of reserve strength and power, was one of
those men regarding whom less-favoured mortals are tempted
seriously to wonder why all the gifts of fortune should be
showered on one individual.  He was not only clever and good to
look upon, but he possessed that indefinable charm of personality
which is quite independent of physical beauty or mental ability.
He had steady, grayish-blue eyes, dark chestnut hair with a glint
of gold in its waves when the sunlight struck it, and a chin that
gave the world assurance of a chin.  He was a rich man's son,
with a clean young manhood behind him and splendid prospects
before him.  He was considered a practical sort of fellow,
utterly guiltless of romantic dreams and visions of any sort.

"I am afraid Eric Marshall will never do one quixotic thing,"
said a Queenslea professor, who had a habit of uttering rather
mysterious epigrams, "but if he ever does it will supply the one
thing lacking in him."

David Baker was a short, stocky fellow with an ugly, irregular,
charming face; his eyes were brown and keen and secretive; his
mouth had a comical twist which became sarcastic, or teasing, or
winning, as he willed.  His voice was generally as soft and
musical as a woman's; but some few who had seen David Baker
righteously angry and heard the tones which then issued from his
lips were in no hurry to have the experience repeated.

He was a doctor--a specialist in troubles of the throat and
voice--and he was beginning to have a national reputation.  He
was on the staff of the Queenslea Medical College and it was
whispered that before long he would be called to fill an
important vacancy at McGill.

He had won his way to success through difficulties and drawbacks
which would have daunted most men.  In the year Eric was born
David Baker was an errand boy in the big department store of
Marshall & Company.  Thirteen years later he graduated with high
honors from Queenslea Medical College.  Mr. Marshall had given
him all the help which David's sturdy pride could be induced to
accept, and now he insisted on sending the young man abroad for a
post-graduate course in London and Germany.  David Baker had
eventually repaid every cent Mr. Marshall had expended on him;
but he never ceased to cherish a passionate gratitude to the kind
and generous man; and he loved that man's son with a love
surpassing that of brothers.

He had followed Eric's college course with keen, watchful
interest.  It was his wish that Eric should take up the study of
law or medicine now that he was through Arts; and he was greatly
disappointed that Eric should have finally made up his mind to go
into business with his father.

"It's a clean waste of your talents," he grumbled, as they walked
home from the college.  "You'd win fame and distinction in law--
that glib tongue of yours was meant for a lawyer and it is sheer
flying in the face of Providence to devote it to commercial
uses--a flat crossing of the purposes of destiny.  Where is your
ambition, man?"

"In the right place," answered Eric, with his ready laugh.  "It
is not your kind, perhaps, but there is room and need for all
kinds in this lusty young country of ours.  Yes, I am going into
the business.  In the first place, it has been father's cherished
desire ever since I was born, and it would hurt him pretty badly
if I backed out now.  He wished me to take an Arts course because
he believed that every man should have as liberal an education as
he can afford to get, but now that I have had it he wants me in
the firm."

"He wouldn't oppose you if he thought you really wanted to go in
for something else."

"Not he. But I don't really want to--that's the point, David,
man.  You hate a business life so much yourself that you can't
get it into your blessed noddle that another man might like it.
There are many lawyers in the world--too many, perhaps--but there
are never too many good honest men of business, ready to do clean
big things for the betterment of humanity and the upbuilding of
their country, to plan great enterprises and carry them through
with brain and courage, to manage and control, to aim high and
strike one's aim.  There, I'm waxing eloquent, so I'd better
stop.  But ambition, man!  Why, I'm full of it--it's bubbling in
every pore of me.  I mean to make the department store of
Marshall & Company famous from ocean to ocean.  Father started in
life as a poor boy from a Nova Scotian farm.  He has built up a
business that has a provincial reputation.  I mean to carry it
on.  In five years it shall have a maritime reputation, in ten, a
Canadian.  I want to make the firm of Marshall & Company stand
for something big in the commercial interests of Canada.  Isn't
that as honourable an ambition as trying to make black seem white
in a court of law, or discovering some new disease with a
harrowing name to torment poor creatures who might otherwise die
peacefully in blissful ignorance of what ailed them?"

"When you begin to make poor jokes it is time to stop arguing
with you," said David, with a shrug of his fat shoulders.  "Go
your own gait and dree your own weird.  I'd as soon expect
success in trying to storm the citadel single-handed as in trying
to turn you from any course about which you had once made up your
mind.  Whew, this street takes it out of a fellow!  What could
have possessed our ancestors to run a town up the side of a hill?
I'm not so slim and active as I was on MY graduation day ten
years ago.  By the way, what a lot of co-eds were in your
class--twenty, if I counted right.  When I graduated there were
only two ladies in our class and they were the pioneers of their
sex at Queenslea.  They were well past their first youth, very
grim and angular and serious; and they could never have been on
speaking terms with a mirror in their best days.  But mark you,
they were excellent females--oh, very excellent.  Times have
changed with a vengeance, judging from the line-up of co-eds
to-day.  There was one girl there who can't be a day over
eighteen--and she looked as if she were made out of gold and
roseleaves and dewdrops."

"The oracle speaks in poetry," laughed Eric.  "That was Florence
Percival, who led the class in mathematics, as I'm a living man.
By many she is considered the beauty of her class.  I can't say
that such is my opinion.  I don't greatly care for that blonde,
babyish style of loveliness--I prefer Agnes Campion.  Did you
notice her--the tall, dark girl with the ropes of hair and a sort
of crimson, velvety bloom on her face, who took honours in
philosophy?"

"I DID notice her," said David emphatically, darting a keen side
glance at his friend.  "I noticed her most particularly and
critically--for someone whispered her name behind me and coupled
it with the exceedingly interesting information that Miss Campion
was supposed to be the future Mrs. Eric Marshall.  Whereupon I
stared at her with all my eyes."

"There is no truth in that report," said Eric in a tone of
annoyance.  "Agnes and I are the best of friends and nothing
more.  I like and admire her more than any woman I know; but if
the future Mrs. Eric Marshall exists in the flesh I haven't met
her yet.  I haven't even started out to look for her--and don't
intend to for some years to come.  I have something else to think
of," he concluded, in a tone of contempt, for which anyone might
have known he would be punished sometime if Cupid were not deaf
as well as blind.

"You'll meet the lady of the future some day," said David dryly.
"And in spite of your scorn I venture to predict that if fate
doesn't bring her before long you'll very soon start out to look
for her.  A word of advice, oh, son of your mother.  When you go
courting take your common sense with you."

"Do you think I shall be likely to leave it behind?" asked Eric
amusedly.

"Well, I mistrust you," said David, sagely wagging his head.
"The Lowland Scotch part of you is all right, but there's a
Celtic streak in you, from that little Highland grandmother of
yours, and when a man has that there's never any knowing where it
will break out, or what dance it will lead him, especially when
it comes to this love-making business.  You are just as likely as
not to lose your head over some little fool or shrew for the sake
of her outward favour and make yourself miserable for life.  When
you pick you a wife please remember that I shall reserve the
right to pass a candid opinion on her."

"Pass all the opinions you like, but it is MY opinion, and mine
only, which will matter in the long run," retorted Eric.

"Confound you, yes, you stubborn offshoot of a stubborn breed,"
growled David, looking at him affectionately.  "I know that, and
that is why I'll never feel at ease about you until I see you
married to the right sort of a girl.  She's not hard to find.
Nine out of ten girls in this country of ours are fit for kings'
palaces.  But the tenth always has to be reckoned with."

"You are as bad as _Clever Alice_ in the fairy tale who worried
over the future of her unborn children," protested Eric.

"_Clever Alice_ has been very unjustly laughed at," said David
gravely.  "We doctors know that.  Perhaps she overdid the
worrying business a little, but she was perfectly right in
principle.  If people worried a little more about their unborn
children--at least, to the extent of providing a proper heritage,
physically, mentally, and morally, for them--and then stopped
worrying about them after they ARE born, this world would be a
very much pleasanter place to live in, and the human race would
make more progress in a generation than it has done in recorded
history."

"Oh, if you are going to mount your dearly beloved hobby of
heredity I am not going to argue with you, David, man.  But as
for the matter of urging me to hasten and marry me a wife, why
don't you"--It was on Eric's lips to say, "Why don't you get
married to a girl of the right sort yourself and set me a good
example?"  But he checked himself.  He knew that there was an old
sorrow in David Baker's life which was not to be unduly jarred by
the jests even of privileged friendship.  He changed his question
to, "Why don't you leave this on the knees of the gods where it
properly belongs?  I thought you were a firm believer in
predestination, David."

"Well, so I am, to a certain extent," said David cautiously.  "I
believe, as an excellent old aunt of mine used to say, that what
is to be will be and what isn't to be happens sometimes.  And it
is precisely such unchancy happenings that make the scheme of
things go wrong.  I dare say you think me an old fogy, Eric; but
I know something more of the world than you do, and I believe,
with Tennyson's _Arthur_, that 'there's no more subtle master
under heaven than is the maiden passion for a maid.'  I want to
see you safely anchored to the love of some good woman as soon as
may be, that's all.  I'm rather sorry Miss Campion isn't your
lady of the future.  I liked her looks, that I did.  She is good
and strong and true--and has the eyes of a woman who could love
in a way that would be worth while.  Moreover, she's well-born,
well-bred, and well-educated--three very indispensable things
when it comes to choosing a woman to fill your mother's place,
friend of mine!"

"I agree with you," said Eric carelessly. "I could not marry any
woman who did not fulfill those conditions.  But, as I have said,
I am not in love with Agnes Campion--and it wouldn't be of any
use if I were.  She is as good as engaged to Larry West.  You
remember West?"

"That thin, leggy fellow you chummed with so much your first two
years in Queenslea?  Yes, what has become of him?"

"He had to drop out after his second year for financial reasons.
He is working his own way through college, you know.  For the
past two years he has been teaching school in some out-of-the-way
place over in Prince Edward Island.  He isn't any too well, poor
fellow--never was very strong and has studied remorselessly.  I
haven't heard from him since February.  He said then that he was
afraid he wasn't going to be able to stick it out till the end of
the school year.  I hope Larry won't break down.  He is a fine
fellow and worthy even of Agnes Campion.  Well, here we are.
Coming in, David?"

"Not this afternoon--haven't got time.  I must mosey up to the
North End to see a man who has got a lovely throat.  Nobody can
find out what is the matter.  He has puzzled all the doctors.  He
has puzzled me, but I'll find out what is wrong with him if he'll
only live long enough."



CHAPTER II. A LETTER OF DESTINY

Eric, finding that his father had not yet returned from the
college, went into the library and sat down to read a letter he
had picked up from the hall table.  It was from Larry West, and
after the first few lines Eric's face lost the absent look it had
worn and assumed an expression of interest.

"I am writing to ask a favour of you, Marshall," wrote West.
"The fact is, I've fallen into the hands of the Philistines--that
is to say, the doctors.  I've not been feeling very fit all
winter but I've held on, hoping to finish out the year.

"Last week my landlady--who is a saint in spectacles and
calico--looked at me one morning at the breakfast table and said,
VERY gently, 'You must go to town to-morrow, Master, and see a
doctor about yourself.'

"I went and did not stand upon the order of my going.  Mrs.
Williamson is She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.  She has an inconvenient
habit of making you realize that she is exactly right, and that
you would be all kinds of a fool if you didn't take her advice.
You feel that what she thinks to-day you will think to-morrow.

"In Charlottetown I consulted a doctor.  He punched and pounded
me, and poked things at me and listened at the other end of them;
and finally he said I must stop work 'immejutly and to onct' and
hie me straightway to a climate not afflicted with the north-east
winds of Prince Edward Island in the spring.  I am not to be
allowed to do any work until the fall.  Such was his dictum and
Mrs. Williamson enforces it.

"I shall teach this week out and then the spring vacation of
three weeks begins.  I want you to come over and take my place as
pedagogue in the Lindsay school for the last week in May and the
month of June.  The school year ends then and there will be
plenty of teachers looking for the place, but just now I cannot
get a suitable substitute.  I have a couple of pupils who are
preparing to try the Queen's Academy entrance examinations, and I
don't like to leave them in the lurch or hand them over to the
tender mercies of some third-class teacher who knows little Latin
and less Greek.   Come over and take the school till the end of
the term, you petted son of luxury.  It will do you a world of
good to learn how rich a man feels when he is earning twenty-five
dollars a month by his own unaided efforts!

"Seriously, Marshall, I hope you can come, for I don't know any
other fellow I can ask.  The work isn't hard, though you'll
likely find it monotonous.  Of course, this little north-shore
farming settlement isn't a very lively place.  The rising and
setting of the sun are the most exciting events of the average
day.  But the people are very kind and hospitable; and Prince
Edward Island in the month of June is such a thing as you don't
often see except in happy dreams.  There are some trout in the
pond and you'll always find an old salt at the harbour ready and
willing to take you out cod-fishing or lobstering.

"I'll bequeath you my boarding house.  You'll find it comfortable
and not further from the school than a good constitutional.  Mrs.
Williamson is the dearest soul alive; and she is one of those
old-fashioned cooks who feed you on feasts of fat things and
whose price is above rubies.

"Her husband, Robert, or Bob, as he is commonly called despite
his sixty years, is quite a character in his way.  He is an
amusing old gossip, with a turn for racy comment and a finger in
everybody's pie.  He knows everything about everybody in Lindsay
for three generations back.

"They have no living children, but Old Bob has a black cat which
is his especial pride and darling.  The name of this animal is
Timothy and as such he must always be called and referred to.
Never, as you value Robert's good opinion, let him hear you
speaking of his pet as 'the cat,' or even as 'Tim.'  You will
never be forgiven and he will not consider you a fit person to
have charge of the school.

"You shall have my room, a little place over the kitchen, with a
ceiling that follows the slant of the roof down one side, against
which you will bump your head times innumerable until you learn
to remember that it is there, and a looking glass which will make
one of your eyes as small as a pea and the other as big as an
orange.

"But to compensate for these disadvantages the supply of towels
is generous and unexceptionable; and there is a window whence you
will daily behold an occidental view over Lindsay Harbour and the
gulf beyond which is an unspeakable miracle of beauty.  The sun
is setting over it as I write and I see such a sea of glass
mingled with fire as might have figured in the visions of the
Patmian seer.  A vessel is sailing away into the gold and crimson
and pearl of the horizon; the big revolving light on the tip of
the headland beyond the harbour has just been lighted and is
winking and flashing like a beacon,

                           "'O'er the foam
           Of perilous seas in faerie lands forlorn.'"

"Wire me if you can come; and if you can, report for duty on the
twenty-third of May."

Mr. Marshall, Senior, came in, just as Eric was thoughtfully
folding up his letter.  The former looked more like a benevolent
old clergyman or philanthropist than the keen, shrewd, somewhat
hard, although just and honest, man of business that he really
was.  He had a round, rosy face, fringed with white whiskers, a
fine head of long white hair, and a pursed-up mouth.  Only in his
blue eyes was a twinkle that would have made any man who designed
getting the better of him in a bargain think twice before he made
the attempt.

It was easily seen that Eric must have inherited his personal
beauty and distinction of form from his mother, whose picture
hung on the dark wall between the windows.  She had died while
still young, when Eric was a boy of ten.  During her lifetime she
had been the object of the passionate devotion of both her
husband and son; and the fine, strong, sweet face of the picture
was a testimony that she had been worthy of their love and
reverence.  The same face, cast in a masculine mold, was repeated
in Eric; the chestnut hair grew off his forehead in the same way;
his eyes were like hers, and in his grave moods they held a
similar expression, half brooding, half tender, in their depths.

Mr. Marshall was very proud of his son's success in college, but
he had no intention of letting him see it.  He loved this boy of
his, with the dead mother's eyes, better than anything on earth,
and all his hopes and ambitions were bound up in him.

"Well, that fuss is over, thank goodness," he said testily, as he
dropped into his favourite chair.

"Didn't you find the programme interesting?" asked Eric absently.

"Most of it was tommyrot," said his father.  "The only things I
liked were Charlie's Latin prayer and those pretty little girls
trotting up to get their diplomas.  Latin IS the language for
praying in, I do believe,--at least, when a man has a voice like
Old Charlie's.  There was such a sonorous roll to the words that
the mere sound of them made me feel like getting down on my
marrow bones.  And then those girls were as pretty as pinks, now
weren't they?  Agnes was the finest-looking of the lot in my
opinion.  I hope it's true that you're courting her, Eric?"

"Confound it, father," said Eric, half irritably, half
laughingly, "have you and David Baker entered into a conspiracy
to hound me into matrimony whether I will or no?"

"I've never said a word to David Baker on such a subject,"
protested Mr. Marshall.

"Well, you are just as bad as he is.  He hectored me all the way
home from the college on the subject.  But why are you in such a
hurry to have me married, dad?"

"Because I want a homemaker in this house as soon as may be.
There has never been one since your mother died.  I am tired of
housekeepers.  And I want to see your children at my knees before
I die, Eric, and I'm an old man now."

"Well, your wish is natural, father," said Eric gently, with a
glance at his mother's picture.  "But I can't rush out and marry
somebody off-hand, can I?  And I fear it wouldn't exactly do to
advertise for a wife, even in these days of commercial
enterprise."

"Isn't there ANYBODY you're fond of?" queried Mr. Marshall, with
the patient air of a man who overlooks the frivolous jests of
youth.

"No. I never yet saw the woman who could make my heart beat any
faster."

"I don't know what you young men are made of nowadays," growled
his father.  "I was in love half a dozen times before I was your
age."

"You might have been 'in love.'  But you never LOVED any woman
until you met my mother.  I know that, father.  And it didn't
happen till you were pretty well on in life either."

"You're too hard to please.  That's what's the matter, that's
what's the matter!"

"Perhaps I am.  When a man has had a mother like mine his
standard of womanly sweetness is apt to be pitched pretty high.
Let's drop the subject, father.  Here, I want you to read this
letter--it's from Larry."

"Humph!" grunted Mr. Marshall, when he had finished with it.  "So
Larry's knocked out at last--always thought he would be--always
expected it.  Sorry, too.  He was a decent fellow.  Well, are you
going?"

"Yes, I think so, if you don't object."

"You'll have a pretty monotonous time of it, judging from his
account of Lindsay."

"Probably.  But I am not going over in search of excitement.  I'm
going to oblige Larry and have a look at the Island."

"Well, it's worth looking at, some parts of the year," conceded
Mr. Marshall.  "When I'm on Prince Edward Island in the summer I
always understand an old Scotch Islander I met once in Winnipeg.
He was always talking of 'the Island.'  Somebody once asked him,
'What island do you mean?'  He simply LOOKED at that ignorant
man.  Then he said, 'Why, Prince Edward Island, mon.  WHAT OTHER
ISLAND IS THERE?'  Go if you'd like to.  You need a rest after
the grind of examinations before settling down to business.  And
mind you don't get into any mischief, young sir."

"Not much likelihood of that in a place like Lindsay, I fancy,"
laughed Eric.

"Probably the devil finds as much mischief for idle hands in
Lindsay as anywhere else.  The worst tragedy I ever heard of
happened on a backwoods farm, fifteen miles from a railroad and
five from a store.  However, I expect your mother's son to behave
himself in the fear of God and man.  In all likelihood the worst
thing that will happen to you over there will be that some
misguided woman will put you to sleep in a spare room bed.  And
if that does happen may the Lord have mercy on your soul!"



CHAPTER III. THE MASTER OF LINDSAY SCHOOL

One evening, a month later, Eric Marshall came out of the old,
white-washed schoolhouse at Lindsay, and locked the door--which
was carved over with initials innumerable, and built of double
plank in order that it might withstand all the assaults and
batteries to which it might be subjected.

Eric's pupils had gone home an hour before, but he had stayed to
solve some algebra problems, and correct some Latin exercises for
his advanced students.

The sun was slanting in warm yellow lines through the thick grove
of maples to the west of the building, and the dim green air
beneath them burst into golden bloom.  A couple of sheep were
nibbling the lush grass in a far corner of the play-ground; a
cow-bell, somewhere in the maple woods, tinkled faintly and
musically, on the still crystal air, which, in spite of its
blandness, still retained a touch of the wholesome austerity and
poignancy of a Canadian spring.  The whole world seemed to have
fallen, for the time being, into a pleasant untroubled dream.

The scene was very peaceful and pastoral--almost too much so, the
young man thought, with a shrug of his shoulders, as he stood in
the worn steps and gazed about him.  How was he going to put in a
whole month here, he wondered, with a little smile at his own
expense.

"Father would chuckle if he knew I was sick of it already," he
thought, as he walked across the play-ground to the long red road
that ran past the school.  "Well, one week is ended, at any rate.
I've earned my own living for five whole days, and that is
something I could never say before in all my twenty-four years of
existence.  It is an exhilarating thought.  But teaching the
Lindsay district school is distinctly NOT exhilarating--at least
in such a well-behaved school as this, where the pupils are so
painfully good that I haven't even the traditional excitement of
thrashing obstreperous bad boys.  Everything seems to go by clock
work in Lindsay educational institution.  Larry must certainly
have possessed a marked gift for organizing and drilling.  I feel
as if I were merely a big cog in an orderly machine that ran
itself.  However, I understand that there are some pupils who
haven't shown up yet, and who, according to all reports, have not
yet had the old Adam totally drilled out of them.  They may make
things more interesting.  Also a few more compositions, such as
John Reid's, would furnish some spice to professional life."

Eric's laughter wakened the echoes as he swung into the road down
the long sloping hill.  He had given his fourth grade pupils
their own choice of subjects in the composition class that
morning, and John Reid, a sober, matter-of-fact little urchin,
with not the slightest embryonic development of a sense of
humour, had, acting upon the whispered suggestion of a roguish
desk-mate, elected to write upon "Courting."  His opening
sentence made Eric's face twitch mutinously whenever he recalled
it during the day.  "Courting is a very pleasant thing which a
great many people go too far with."

The distant hills and wooded uplands were tremulous and aerial in
delicate spring-time gauzes of pearl and purple.  The young,
green-leafed maples crowded thickly to the very edge of the road
on either side, but beyond them were emerald fields basking in
sunshine, over which cloud shadows rolled, broadened, and
vanished.  Far below the fields a calm ocean slept bluely, and
sighed in its sleep, with the murmur that rings for ever in the
ear of those whose good fortune it is to have been born within
the sound of it.

Now and then Eric met some callow, check-shirted, bare-legged lad
on horseback, or a shrewd-faced farmer in a cart, who nodded and
called out cheerily, "Howdy, Master?"  A young girl, with a rosy,
oval face, dimpled cheeks, and pretty dark eyes filled with shy
coquetry, passed him, looking as if she would not be at all
averse to a better acquaintance with the new teacher.

Half way down the hill Eric met a shambling, old gray horse
drawing an express wagon which had seen better days.  The driver
was a woman: she appeared to be one of those drab-tinted
individuals who can never have felt a rosy emotion in all their
lives.  She stopped her horse, and beckoned Eric over to her with
the knobby handle of a faded and bony umbrella.

"Reckon you're the new Master, ain't you?" she asked.

Eric admitted that he was.

"Well, I'm glad to see you," she said, offering him a hand in a
much darned cotton glove that had once been black.

"I was right sorry to see Mr. West go, for he was a right good
teacher, and as harmless, inoffensive a creetur as ever lived.
But I always told him every time I laid eyes on him that he was
in consumption, if ever a man was.  YOU look real healthy--though
you can't aways tell by looks, either.  I had a brother
complected like you, but he was killed in a railroad accident out
west when he was real young.

"I've got a boy I'll be sending to school to you next week.  He'd
oughter gone this week, but I had to keep him home to help me put
the pertaters in; for his father won't work and doesn't work and
can't be made to work.

"Sandy--his full name is Edward Alexander--called after both his
grandfathers--hates the idee of going to school worse 'n pisen--
always did.  But go he shall, for I'm determined he's got to have
more larning hammered into his head yet.  I reckon you'll have
trouble with him, Master, for he's as stupid as an owl, and as
stubborn as Solomon's mule.  But mind this, Master, I'll back you
up.  You just lick Sandy good and plenty when he needs it, and
send me a scrape of the pen home with him, and I'll give him
another dose.

"There's people that always sides in with their young ones when
there's any rumpus kicked up in the school, but I don't hold to
that, and never did.  You can depend on Rebecca Reid every time,
Master."

"Thank you.  I am sure I can," said Eric, in his most winning
tones.

He kept his face straight until it was safe to relax, and Mrs.
Reid drove on with a soft feeling in her leathery old heart,
which had been so toughened by long endurance of poverty and
toil, and a husband who wouldn't work and couldn't be made to
work, that it was no longer a very susceptible organ where
members of the opposite sex were concerned.

Mrs. Reid reflected that this young man had a way with him.

Eric already knew most of the Lindsay folks by sight; but at the
foot of the hill he met two people, a man and a boy, whom he did
not know.  They were sitting in a shabby, old-fashioned wagon,
and were watering their horse at the brook, which gurgled
limpidly under the little plank bridge in the hollow.

Eric surveyed them with some curiosity.  They did not look in the
least like the ordinary run of Lindsay people.  The boy, in
particular, had a distinctly foreign appearance, in spite of the
gingham shirt and homespun trousers, which seemed to be the
regulation, work-a-day outfit for the Lindsay farmer lads.  He
had a lithe, supple body, with sloping shoulders, and a lean,
satiny brown throat above his open shirt collar.  His head was
covered with thick, silky, black curls, and the hand that hung
down by the side of the wagon was unusually long and slender.
His face was richly, though somewhat heavily featured, olive
tinted, save for the cheeks, which had a dusky crimson bloom.
His mouth was as red and beguiling as a girl's, and his eyes were
large, bold and black.  All in all, he was a strikingly handsome
fellow; but the expression of his face was sullen, and he somehow
gave Eric the impression of a sinuous, feline creature basking in
lazy grace, but ever ready for an unexpected spring.

The other occupant of the wagon was a man between sixty-five and
seventy, with iron-gray hair, a long, full, gray beard, a
harsh-featured face, and deep-set hazel eyes under bushy,
bristling brows.  He was evidently tall, with a spare, ungainly
figure, and stooping shoulders.  His mouth was close-lipped and
relentless, and did not look as if it had ever smiled.  Indeed,
the idea of smiling could not be connected with this man--it was
utterly incongruous.  Yet there was nothing repellent about his
face; and there was something in it that compelled Eric's
attention.

He rather prided himself on being a student of physiognomy, and
he felt quite sure that this man was no ordinary Lindsay farmer
of the genial, garrulous type with which he was familiar.

Long after the old wagon, with its oddly assorted pair, had gone
lumbering up the hill, Eric found himself thinking of the stern,
heavy browed man and the black-eyed, red-lipped boy.



CHAPTER IV. A TEA TABLE CONVERSATION

The Williamson place, where Eric boarded, was on the crest of the
succeeding hill.  He liked it as well as Larry West had
prophesied that he would.  The Williamsons, as well as the rest
of the Lindsay people, took it for granted that he was a poor
college student working his way through as Larry West had been
doing.  Eric did not disturb this belief, although he said
nothing to contribute to it.

The Williamsons were at tea in the kitchen when Eric went in.
Mrs. Williamson was the "saint in spectacles and calico" which
Larry West had termed her.  Eric liked her greatly.  She was a
slight, gray-haired woman, with a thin, sweet, high-bred face,
deeply lined with the records of outlived pain.  She talked
little as a rule; but, in the pungent country phrase she never
spoke but she said something.  The one thing that constantly
puzzled Eric was how such a woman ever came to marry Robert
Williamson.

She smiled in a motherly fashion at Eric, as he hung his hat on
the white-washed wall and took his place at the table.  Outside
of the window behind him was a birch grove which, in the
westering sun, was a tremulous splendour, with a sea of
undergrowth wavered into golden billows by every passing wind.

Old Robert Williamson sat opposite him, on a bench.  He was a
small, lean old man, half lost in loose clothes that seemed far
too large for him.  When he spoke his voice was as thin and
squeaky as he appeared to be himself.

The other end of the bench was occupied by Timothy, sleek and
complacent, with a snowy breast and white paws.  After old Robert
had taken a mouthful of anything he gave a piece to Timothy, who
ate it daintily and purred resonant gratitude.

"You see we're busy waiting for you, Master," said old Robert.
"You're late this evening.  Keep any of the youngsters in?
That's a foolish way of punishing them, as hard on yourself as on
them.  One teacher we had four years ago used to lock them in and
go home.  Then he'd go back in an hour and let them out--if they
were there.  They weren't always.  Tom Ferguson kicked the panels
out of the old door once and got out that way.  We put a new door
of double plank in that they couldn't kick out."

"I stayed in the schoolroom to do some work," said Eric briefly.

"Well, you've missed Alexander Tracy.  He was here to find out if
you could play checkers, and, when I told him you could, he left
word for you to go up and have a game some evening soon.  Don't
beat him too often, even if you can.  You'll need to stand in
with him, I tell you, Master, for he's got a son that may brew
trouble for you when he starts in to go to school.  Seth Tracy's
a young imp, and he'd far sooner be in mischief than eat.  He
tries to run on every new teacher and he's run two clean out of
the school.  But he met his match in Mr. West.  William Tracy's
boys now--you won't have a scrap of bother with THEM.  They're
always good because their mother tells them every Sunday that
they'll go straight to hell if they don't behave in school.  It's
effective.  Take some preserve, Master.  You know we don't help
things here the way Mrs. Adam Scott does when she has boarders,
'I s'pose you don't want any of this--nor you--nor you?'  Mother,
Aleck says old George Wright is having the time of his life.  His
wife has gone to Charlottetown to visit her sister and he is his
own boss for the first time since he was married, forty years
ago.  He's on a regular orgy, Aleck says.  He smokes in the
parlour and sits up till eleven o'clock reading dime novels."

"Perhaps I met Mr. Tracy," said Eric.  "Is he a tall man, with
gray hair and a dark, stern face?"

"No, he's a round, jolly fellow, is Aleck, and he stopped growing
pretty much before he'd ever begun.  I reckon the man you mean is
Thomas Gordon.  I seen him driving down the road too.  HE won't
be troubling you with invitations up, small fear of it.  The
Gordons ain't sociable, to say the least of it.  No, sir!
Mother, pass the biscuits to the Master."

"Who was the young fellow he had with him?" asked Eric curiously.

"Neil--Neil Gordon."

"That is a Scotchy name for such a face and eyes.  I should
rather have expected Guiseppe or Angelo.  The boy looks like an
Italian."

"Well, now, you know, Master, I reckon it's likely he does,
seeing that that's exactly what he is.  You've hit the nail
square on the head. Italyun, yes, sir!  Rather too much so, I'm
thinking, for decent folks' taste."

"How has it happened that an Italian boy with a Scotch name is
living in a place like Lindsay?"

"Well, Master, it was this way.  About twenty-two years ago--WAS
it twenty-two, Mother or twenty-four?  Yes, it was twenty-two--
'twas the same year our Jim was born and he'd have been
twenty-two if he'd lived, poor little fellow.  Well, Master,
twenty-two years ago a couple of Italian pack peddlers came along
and called at the Gordon place.  The country was swarming with
them then.  I useter set the dog on one every day on an average.

"Well, these peddlers were man and wife, and the woman took sick
up there at the Gordon place, and Janet Gordon took her in and
nursed her.  A baby was born the next day, and the woman died.
Then the first thing anybody knew the father skipped clean out,
pack and all, and was never seen or heard tell of afterwards.
The Gordons were left with the fine youngster to their hands.
Folks advised them to send him to the Orphan Asylum, and 'twould
have been the wisest plan, but the Gordons were never fond of
taking advice.  Old James Gordon was living then, Thomas and
Janet's father, and he said he would never turn a child out of
his door.  He was a masterful old man and liked to be boss.
Folks used to say he had a grudge against the sun 'cause it rose
and set without his say so.  Anyhow, they kept the baby.  They
called him Neil and had him baptized same as any Christian child.
He's always lived there.  They did well enough by him.  He was
sent to school and taken to church and treated like one of
themselves.  Some folks think they made too much of him.  It
doesn't always do with that kind, for 'what's bred in bone is
mighty apt to come out in flesh,' if 'taint kept down pretty
well.  Neil's smart and a great worker, they tell me.  But folks
hereabouts don't like him.  They say he ain't to be trusted
further'n you can see him, if as far.  It's certain he's awful
hot tempered, and one time when he was going to school he near
about killed a boy he'd took a spite to--choked him till he was
black in the face and Neil had to be dragged off."

"Well now, father, you know they teased him terrible," protested
Mrs. Williamson.  "The poor boy had a real hard time when he went
to school, Master.  The other children were always casting things
up to him and calling him names."

"Oh, I daresay they tormented him a lot," admitted her husband.
"He's a great hand at the fiddle and likes company.  He goes to
the harbour a good deal.  But they say he takes sulky spells when
he hasn't a word to throw to a dog.  'Twouldn't be any wonder,
living with the Gordons.  They're all as queer as Dick's
hat-band."

"Father, you shouldn't talk so about your neighbours," said his
wife rebukingly.

"Well now, Mother, you know they are, if you'd only speak up
honest.  But you're like old Aunt Nancy Scott, you never say
anything uncharitable except in the way of business.  You know
the Gordons ain't like other people and never were and never will
be.  They're about the only queer folks we have in Lindsay,
Master, except old Peter Cook, who keeps twenty-five cats.  Lord,
Master, think of it!  What chanct would a poor mouse have?  None
of the rest of us are queer, leastwise, we hain't found it out if
we are.  But, then, we're mighty uninteresting, I'm bound to
admit that."

"Where do the Gordons live?" asked Eric, who had grown used to
holding fast to a given point of inquiry through all the
bewildering mazes of old Robert's conversation.

"Away up yander, half a mile in from Radnor road, with a thick
spruce wood atween them and all the rest of the world.  They
never go away anywheres, except to church--they never miss
that--and nobody goes there.  There's just old Thomas, and his
sister Janet, and a niece of theirs, and this here Neil we've
been talking about.  They're a queer, dour, cranky lot, and I
WILL say it, Mother.  There, give your old man a cup of tea and
never mind the way his tongue runs on.  Speaking of tea, do you
know Mrs. Adam Palmer and Mrs. Jim Martin took tea together at
Foster Reid's last Wednesday afternoon?"

"No, why, I thought they were on bad terms," said Mrs.
Williamson, betraying a little feminine curiosity.

"So they are, so they are.  But they both happened to visit Mrs.
Foster the same afternoon and neither would leave because that
would be knuckling down to the other.  So they stuck it out, on
opposite sides of the parlour.  Mrs. Foster says she never spent
such an uncomfortable afternoon in all her life before.  She
would talk a spell to one and then t'other.  And they kept
talking TO Mrs. Foster and AT each other.  Mrs. Foster says she
really thought she'd have to keep them all night, for neither
would start to go home afore the other.  Finally Jim Martin came
in to look for his wife, 'cause he thought she must have got
stuck in the marsh, and that solved the problem.  Master, you
ain't eating anything.  Don't mind my stopping; I was at it half
an hour afore you come, and anyway I'm in a hurry.  My hired boy
went home to-day.  He heard the rooster crow at twelve last night
and he's gone home to see which of his family is dead.  He knows
one of 'em is.  He heard a rooster crow in the middle of the
night onct afore and the next day he got word that his second
cousin down at Souris was dead.  Mother, if the Master don't want
any more tea, ain't there some cream for Timothy?"



CHAPTER V. A PHANTOM OF DELIGHT

Shortly before sunset that evening Eric went for a walk.  When he
did not go to the shore he liked to indulge in long tramps
through the Lindsay fields and woods, in the mellowness of "the
sweet 'o the year."  Most of the Lindsay houses were built along
the main road, which ran parallel to the shore, or about the
stores at "The Corner."  The farms ran back from them into
solitudes of woods and pasture lands.

Eric struck southwest from the Williamson homestead, in a
direction he had not hitherto explored, and walked briskly along,
enjoying the witchery of the season all about him in earth and
air and sky.  He felt it and loved it and yielded to it, as
anyone of clean life and sane pulses must do.

The spruce wood in which he presently found himself was smitten
through with arrows of ruby light from the setting sun.  He went
through it, walking up a long, purple aisle where the wood-floor
was brown and elastic under his feet, and came out beyond it on a
scene which surprised him.

No house was in sight, but he found himself looking into an
orchard; an old orchard, evidently long neglected and forsaken.
But an orchard dies hard; and this one, which must have been a
very delightful spot once, was delightful still, none the less so
for the air of gentle melancholy which seemed to pervade it, the
melancholy which invests all places that have once been the
scenes of joy and pleasure and young life, and are so no longer,
places where hearts have throbbed, and pulses thrilled, and eyes
brightened, and merry voices echoed.  The ghosts of these things
seem to linger in their old haunts through many empty years.

The orchard was large and long, enclosed in a tumbledown old
fence of longers bleached to a silvery gray in the suns of many
lost summers.  At regular intervals along the fence were tall,
gnarled fir trees, and an evening wind, sweeter than that which
blew over the beds of spice from Lebanon, was singing in their
tops, an earth-old song with power to carry the soul back to the
dawn of time.

Eastward, a thick fir wood grew, beginning with tiny treelets
just feathering from the grass, and grading up therefrom to the
tall veterans of the mid-grove, unbrokenly and evenly, giving the
effect of a solid, sloping green wall, so beautifully compact
that it looked as if it had been clipped into its velvet surface
by art.

Most of the orchard was grown over lushly with grass; but at the
end where Eric stood there was a square, treeless place which had
evidently once served as a homestead garden.  Old paths were
still visible, bordered by stones and large pebbles.  There were
two clumps of lilac trees; one blossoming in royal purple, the
other in white.  Between them was a bed ablow with the starry
spikes of June lilies.  Their penetrating, haunting fragrance
distilled on the dewy air in every soft puff of wind.  Along the
fence rosebushes grew, but it was as yet too early in the season
for roses.

Beyond was the orchard proper, three long rows of trees with
green avenues between, each tree standing in a wonderful blow of
pink and white.

The charm of the place took sudden possession of Eric as nothing
had ever done before.  He was not given to romantic fancies; but
the orchard laid hold of him subtly and drew him to itself, and
he was never to be quite his own man again.  He went into it over
one of the broken panels of fence, and so, unknowing, went
forward to meet all that life held for him.

He walked the length of the orchard's middle avenue between long,
sinuous boughs picked out with delicate, rose-hearted bloom.
When he reached its southern boundary he flung himself down in a
grassy corner of the fence where another lilac bush grew, with
ferns and wild blue violets at its roots.  From where he now was
he got a glimpse of a house about a quarter of a mile away, its
gray gable peering out from a dark spruce wood.  It seemed a
dull, gloomy, remote place, and he did not know who lived there.

He had a wide outlook to the west, over far hazy fields and misty
blue intervales.  The sun had just set, and the whole world of
green meadows beyond swam in golden light.  Across a long valley
brimmed with shadow were uplands of sunset, and great sky lakes
of saffron and rose where a soul might lose itself in colour.
The air was very fragrant with the baptism of the dew, and the
odours of a bed of wild mint upon which he had trampled.  Robins
were whistling, clear and sweet and sudden, in the woods all
about him.

"This is a veritable 'haunt of ancient peace,'" quoted Eric,
looking around with delighted eyes.  "I could fall asleep here,
dream dreams and see visions.  What a sky!  Could anything be
diviner than that fine crystal eastern blue, and those frail
white clouds that look like woven lace?  What a dizzying,
intoxicating fragrance lilacs have!  I wonder if perfume could
set a man drunk.  Those apple trees now--why, what is that?"

Eric started up and listened.  Across the mellow stillness,
mingled with the croon of the wind in the trees and the
flute-like calls of the robins, came a strain of delicious music,
so beautiful and fantastic that Eric held his breath in
astonishment and delight.  Was he dreaming?  No, it was real
music, the music of a violin played by some hand inspired with
the very spirit of harmony.  He had never heard anything like it;
and, somehow, he felt quite sure that nothing exactly like it
ever had been heard before; he believed that that wonderful music
was coming straight from the soul of the unseen violinist, and
translating itself into those most airy and delicate and
exquisite sounds for the first time; the very soul of music, with
all sense and earthliness refined away.

It was an elusive, haunting melody, strangely suited to the time
and place; it had in it the sigh of the wind in the woods, the
eerie whispering of the grasses at dewfall, the white thoughts of
the June lilies, the rejoicing of the apple blossoms; all the
soul of all the old laughter and song and tears and gladness and
sobs the orchard had ever known in the lost years; and besides
all this, there was in it a pitiful, plaintive cry as of some
imprisoned thing calling for freedom and utterance.

At first Eric listened as a man spellbound, mutely and
motionlessly, lost in wonderment.  Then a very natural curiosity
overcame him.  Who in Lindsay could play a violin like that?  And
who was playing so here, in this deserted old orchard, of all
places in the world?

He rose and walked up the long white avenue, going as slowly and
silently as possible, for he did not wish to interrupt the
player.  When he reached the open space of the garden he stopped
short in new amazement and was again tempted into thinking he
must certainly be dreaming.

Under the big branching white lilac tree was an old, sagging,
wooden bench; and on this bench a girl was sitting, playing on an
old brown violin.  Her eyes were on the faraway horizon and she
did not see Eric.  For a few moments he stood there and looked at
her.  The pictures she made photographed itself on his vision to
the finest detail, never to be blotted from his book of
remembrance.  To his latest day Eric Marshall will be able to
recall vividly that scene as he saw it then--the velvet darkness
of the spruce woods, the overarching sky of soft brilliance, the
swaying lilac blossoms, and amid it all the girl on the old bench
with the violin under her chin.

He had, in his twenty-four years of life, met hundreds of pretty
women, scores of handsome women, a scant half dozen of really
beautiful women.  But he knew at once, beyond all possibility of
question or doubt, that he had never seen or imagined anything so
exquisite as this girl of the orchard.  Her loveliness was so
perfect that his breath almost went from him in his first delight
of it.

Her face was oval, marked in every cameo-like line and feature
with that expression of absolute, flawless purity, found in the
angels and Madonnas of old paintings, a purity that held in it no
faintest strain of earthliness.  Her head was bare, and her
thick, jet-black hair was parted above her forehead and hung in
two heavy lustrous braids over her shoulders.  Her eyes were of
such a blue as Eric had never seen in eyes before, the tint of
the sea in the still, calm light that follows after a fine
sunset; they were as luminous as the stars that came out over
Lindsay Harbour in the afterglow, and were fringed about with
very long, soot-black lashes, and arched over by most delicately
pencilled dark eyebrows.  Her skin was as fine and purely tinted
as the heart of a white rose.  The collarless dress of pale blue
print she wore revealed her smooth, slender throat; her sleeves
were rolled up above her elbows and the hand which guided the bow
of her violin was perhaps the most beautiful thing about her,
perfect in shape and texture, firm and white, with rosy-nailed
taper fingers.  One long, drooping plume of lilac blossom lightly
touched her hair and cast a wavering shadow over the flower-like
face beneath it.

There was something very child-like about her, and yet at least
eighteen sweet years must have gone to the making of her.  She
seemed to be playing half unconsciously, as if her thoughts were
far away in some fair dreamland of the skies.  But presently she
looked away from "the bourne of sunset," and her lovely eyes fell
on Eric, standing motionless before her in the shadow of the
apple tree.

The sudden change that swept over her was startling.  She sprang
to her feet, the music breaking in mid-strain and the bow
slipping from her hand to the grass.  Every hint of colour fled
from her face and she trembled like one of the wind-stirred June
lilies.

"I beg your pardon," said Eric hastily.  "I am sorry that I have
alarmed you.  But your music was so beautiful that I did not
remember you were not aware of my presence here.  Please forgive
me."

He stopped in dismay, for he suddenly realized that the
expression on the girl's face was one of terror--not merely the
startled alarm of a shy, childlike creature who had thought
herself alone, but absolute terror.  It was betrayed in her
blanched and quivering lips and in the widely distended blue eyes
that stared back into his with the expression of some trapped
wild thing.

It hurt him that any woman should look at him in such a fashion,
at him who had always held womanhood in such reverence.

"Don't look so frightened," he said gently, thinking only of
calming her fear, and speaking as he would to a child.  "I will
not hurt you. You are safe, quite safe."

In his eagerness to reassure her he took an unconscious step
forward.  Instantly she turned, and, without a sound, fled across
the orchard, through a gap in the northern fence and along what
seemed to be a lane bordering the fir wood beyond and arched over
with wild cherry trees misty white in the gathering gloom.
Before Eric could recover his wits she had vanished from his
sight among the firs.

He stooped and picked up the violin bow, feeling slightly foolish
and very much annoyed.

"Well, this is a most mysterious thing," he said, somewhat
impatiently.  "Am I bewitched?  Who was she?  WHAT was she?  Can
it be possible that she is a Lindsay girl?  And why in the name
of all that's provoking should she be so frightened at the mere
sight of me?  I have never thought I was a particularly hideous
person, but certainly this adventure has not increased my vanity
to any perceptible extent.  Perhaps I have wandered into an
enchanted orchard, and been outwardly transformed into an ogre.
Now that I have come to think of it, there is something quite
uncanny about the place.  Anything might happen here.  It is no
common orchard for the production of marketable apples, that is
plain to be seen.  No, it's a most unwholesome locality; and the
sooner I make my escape from it the better."

He glanced about it with a whimsical smile.  The light was fading
rapidly and the orchard was full of soft, creeping shadows and
silences.  It seemed to wink sleepy eyes of impish enjoyment at
his perplexity. He laid the violin bow down on the old bench.

"Well, there is no use in my following her, and I have no right
to do so even if it were of use.  But I certainly wish she hadn't
fled in such evident terror.  Eyes like hers were never meant to
express anything but tenderness and trust.  Why--why--WHY was she
so frightened?  And who--who--WHO--can she be?"

All the way home, over fields and pastures that were beginning to
be moonlight silvered he pondered the mystery.

"Let me see," he reflected.  "Mr. Williamson was describing the
Lindsay girls for my benefit the other evening.  If I remember
rightly he said that there were four handsome ones in the
district.  What were their names?  Florrie Woods, Melissa
Foster--no, Melissa Palmer--Emma Scott, and Jennie May Ferguson.
Can she be one of them?  No, it is a flagrant waste of time and
gray matter supposing it.  That girl couldn't be a Florrie or a
Melissa or an Emma, while Jennie May is completely out of the
question.  Well, there is some bewitchment in the affair.  Of
that I'm convinced.  So I'd better forget all about it."

But Eric found that it was impossible to forget all about it.
The more he tried to forget, the more keenly and insistently he
remembered.  The girl's exquisite face haunted him and the
mystery of her tantalized him.

True, he knew that, in all likelihood, he might easily solve the
problem by asking the Williamsons about her.  But somehow, to his
own surprise, he found that he shrank from doing this.  He felt
that it was impossible to ask Robert Williamson and probably have
the girl's name overflowed in a stream of petty gossip concerning
her and all her antecedents and collaterals to the third and
fourth generation.  If he had to ask any one it should be Mrs.
Williamson; but he meant to find out the secret for himself if it
were at all possible.

He had planned to go to the harbour the next evening.  One of the
lobstermen had promised to take him out cod-fishing.  But instead
he wandered southwest over the fields again.

He found the orchard easily--he had half expected NOT to find it.
It was still the same fragrant, grassy, wind-haunted spot.  But
it had no occupant and the violin bow was gone from the old
bench.

"Perhaps she tiptoed back here for it by the light o' the moon,"
thought Eric, pleasing his fancy by the vision of a lithe,
girlish figure stealing with a beating heart through mingled
shadow and moonshine.  "I wonder if she will possibly come this
evening, or if I have frightened her away for ever.  I'll hide me
behind this spruce copse and wait."

Eric waited until dark, but no music sounded through the orchard
and no one came to it.  The keenness of his disappointment
surprised him, nay more, it vexed him.  What nonsense to be so
worked up because a little girl he had seen for five minutes
failed to appear!  Where was his common sense, his "gumption," as
old Robert Williamson would have said?  Naturally a man liked to
look at a pretty face.  But was that any reason why he should
feel as if life were flat, stale, and unprofitable simply because
he could not look at it?  He called himself a fool and went home
in a petulant mood.  Arriving there, he plunged fiercely into
solving algebraical equations and working out geometry exercises,
determined to put out of his head forthwith all vain imaginings
of an enchanted orchard, white in the moonshine, with lilts of
elfin music echoing down its long arcades.

The next day was Sunday and Eric went to church twice.  The
Williamson pew was one of the side ones at the top of the church
and its occupants practically faced the congregation.  Eric looked
at every girl and woman in the audience, but he saw nothing of
the face which, setting will power and common sense flatly at
defiance, haunted his memory like a star.

Thomas Gordon was there, sitting alone in his long, empty pew
near the top of the building; and Neil Gordon sang in the choir
which occupied the front pew of the gallery.  He had a powerful
and melodious, though untrained voice, which dominated the
singing and took the colour out of the weaker, more commonplace
tones of the other singers.  He was well-dressed in a suit of
dark blue serge, with a white collar and tie.  But Eric idly
thought it did not become him so well as the working clothes in
which he had first seen him.  He was too obviously dressed up,
and he looked coarser and more out of harmony with his
surroundings.

For two days Eric refused to let himself think of the orchard.
Monday evening he went cod-fishing, and Tuesday evening he went
up to play checkers with Alexander Tracy.  Alexander won all the
games so easily that he never had any respect for Eric Marshall
again.

"Played like a feller whose thoughts were wool gathering," he
complained to his wife.  "He'll never make a checker player--
never in this world."



CHAPTER VI. THE STORY OF KILMENY

Wednesday evening Eric went to the orchard again; and again he
was disappointed.  He went home, determined to solve the mystery
by open inquiry.  Fortune favoured him, for he found Mrs.
Williamson alone, sitting by the west window of her kitchen and
knitting at a long gray sock.  She hummed softly to herself as
she knitted, and Timothy slept blackly at her feet.  She looked
at Eric with quiet affection in her large, candid eyes.  She had
liked Mr. West.  But Eric had found his way into the inner
chamber of her heart, by reason that his eyes were so like those
of the little son she had buried in the Lindsay churchyard many
years before.

"Mrs. Williamson," said Eric, with an affectation of
carelessness, "I chanced on an old deserted orchard back behind
the woods over there last week, a charming bit of wilderness.  Do
you know whose it is?"

"I suppose it must be the old Connors orchard," answered Mrs.
Williamson after a moment's reflection.  "I had forgotten all
about it.  It must be all of thirty years since Mr. and Mrs.
Connors moved away.  Their house and barns were burned down and
they sold the land to Thomas Gordon and went to live in town.
They're both dead now.  Mr. Connors used to be very proud of his
orchard.  There weren't many orchards in Lindsay then, though
almost everybody has one now."

"There was a young girl in it, playing on a violin," said Eric,
annoyed to find that it cost him an effort to speak of her, and
that the blood mounted to his face as he did so.  "She ran away
in great alarm as soon as she saw me, although I do not think I
did or said anything to frighten or vex her.  I have no idea who
she was.  Do you know?"

Mrs. Williamson did not make an immediate reply.  She laid down
her knitting and gazed out of the window as if pondering
seriously some question in her own mind.  Finally she said, with
an intonation of keen interest in her voice,

"I suppose it must have been Kilmeny Gordon, Master."

"Kilmeny Gordon?  Do you mean the niece of Thomas Gordon of whom
your husband spoke?"

"Yes."

"I can hardly believe that the girl I saw can be a member of
Thomas Gordon's family."

"Well, if it wasn't Kilmeny Gordon I don't know who it could have
been.  There is no other house near that orchard and I've heard
she plays the violin.  If it was Kilmeny you've seen what very
few people in Lindsay have ever seen, Master.  And those few have
never seen her close by.  I have never laid eyes on her myself.
It's no wonder she ran away, poor girl.  She isn't used to seeing
strangers."

"I'm rather glad if that was the sole reason of her flight," said
Eric.  "I admit I didn't like to see any girl so frightened of me
as she appeared to be.  She was as white as paper, and so
terrified that she never uttered a word, but fled like a deer to
cover."

"Well, she couldn't have spoken a word in any case," said Mrs.
Williamson quietly.  "Kilmeny Gordon is dumb."

Eric sat in dismayed silence for a moment.  That beautiful
creature afflicted in such a fashion--why, it was horrible!
Mingled with his dismay was a strange pang of personal regret and
disappointment.

"It couldn't have been Kilmeny Gordon, then," he protested at
last, remembering.  "The girl I saw played on the violin
exquisitely.  I never heard anything like it.  It is impossible
that a deaf mute could play like that."

"Oh, she isn't deaf, Master," responded Mrs. Williamson, looking
at Eric keenly through her spectacles.  She picked up her
knitting and fell to work again.  "That is the strange part of
it, if anything about her can be stranger than another.  She can
hear as well as anybody and understands everything that is said
to her.  But she can't speak a word and never could, at least, so
they say.  The truth is, nobody knows much about her.  Janet and
Thomas never speak of her, and Neil won't either.  He has been
well questioned, too, you can depend on that; but he won't ever
say a word about Kilmeny and he gets mad if folks persist."

"Why isn't she to be spoken of?" queried Eric impatiently.  "What
is the mystery about her?"

"It's a sad story, Master.  I suppose the Gordons look on her
existence as a sort of disgrace.  For my own part, I think it's
terrible, the way she's been brought up.  But the Gordons are
very strange people, Mr. Marshall.  I kind of reproved father for
saying so, you remember, but it is true.  They have very strange
ways.  And you've really seen Kilmeny?  What does she look like?
I've heard that she was handsome.  Is it true?"

"I thought her very beautiful," said Eric rather curtly.  "But
HOW has she been brought up, Mrs. Williamson?  And why?"

"Well, I might as well tell you the whole story, Master.  Kilmeny
is the niece of Thomas and Janet Gordon.  Her mother was Margaret
Gordon, their younger sister.  Old James Gordon came out from
Scotland. Janet and Thomas were born in the Old Country and were
small children when they came here.  They were never very
sociable folks, but still they used to visit out some then, and
people used to go there.  They were kind and honest people, even
if they were a little peculiar.

"Mrs. Gordon died a few years after they came out, and four years
later James Gordon went home to Scotland and brought a new wife
back with him.  She was a great deal younger than he was and a
very pretty woman, as my mother often told me.  She was friendly
and gay and liked social life.  The Gordon place was a very
different sort of place after she came there, and even Janet and
Thomas got thawed out and softened down a good bit.  They were
real fond of their stepmother, I've heard.  Then, six years after
she was married, the second Mrs. Gordon died too.  She died when
Margaret was born.  They say James Gordon almost broke his heart
over it.

"Janet brought Margaret up.  She and Thomas just worshipped the
child and so did their father.  I knew Margaret Gordon well once.
We were just the same age and we set together in school.  We were
always good friends until she turned against all the world.

"She was a strange girl in some ways even then, but I always
liked her, though a great many people didn't.  She had some
bitter enemies, but she had some devoted friends too.  That was
her way.  She made folks either hate or love her.  Those who did
love her would have gone through fire and water for her.

"When she grew up she was very pretty--tall and splendid, like a
queen, with great thick braids of black hair and red, red cheeks
and lips.  Everybody who saw her looked at her a second time.
She was a little vain of her beauty, I think, Master.  And she
was proud, oh, she was very proud.  She liked to be first in
everything, and she couldn't bear not to show to good advantage.
She was dreadful determined, too.  You couldn't budge her an
inch, Master, when she once had made up her mind on any point.
But she was warm-hearted and generous.  She could sing like an
angel and she was very clever.  She could learn anything with
just one look at it and she was terrible fond of reading.

"When I'm talking about her like this it all comes back to me,
just what she was like and how she looked and spoke and acted,
and little ways she had of moving her hands and head.  I declare
it almost seems as if she was right here in this room instead of
being over there in the churchyard.  I wish you'd light the lamp,
Master.  I feel kind of nervous."

Eric rose and lighted the lamp, rather wondering at Mrs.
Williamson's unusual exhibition of nerves.  She was generally so
calm and composed.

"Thank you, Master.  That's better.  I won't be fancying now that
Margaret Gordon's here listening to what I'm saying.  I had the
feeling so strong a moment ago.

"I suppose you think I'm a long while getting to Kilmeny, but I'm
coming to that.  I didn't mean to talk so much about Margaret,
but somehow my thoughts got taken up with her.

"Well, Margaret passed the Board and went to Queen's Academy and
got a teacher's license.  She passed pretty well up when she came
out, but Janet told me she cried all night after the pass list
came out because there were some ahead of her.

"She went to teach school over at Radnor.  It was there she met a
man named Ronald Fraser.  Margaret had never had a beau before.
She could have had any young man in Lindsay if she had wanted
him, but she wouldn't look at one of them.  They said it was
because she thought nobody was good enough for her, but that
wasn't the way of it at all, Master.  I knew, because Margaret
and I used to talk of those matters, as girls do.  She didn't
believe in going with anybody unless it was somebody she thought
everything of.  And there was nobody in Lindsay she cared that
much for.

"This Ronald Fraser was a stranger from Nova Scotia and nobody
knew much about him.  He was a widower, although he was only a
young man.  He had set up store-keeping in Radnor and was doing
well.  He was real handsome and had taking ways women like.  It
was said that all the Radnor girls were in love with him, but I
don't think his worst enemy could have said he flirted with them.
He never took any notice of them; but the very first time he saw
Margaret Gordon he fell in love with her and she with him.

"They came over to church in Lindsay together the next Sunday and
everybody said it would be a match.  Margaret looked lovely that
day, so gentle and womanly.  She had been used to hold her head
pretty high, but that day she held it drooping a little and her
black eyes cast down.  Ronald Fraser was very tall and fair, with
blue eyes.  They made as handsome a couple as I ever saw.

"But old James Gordon and Thomas and Janet didn't much approve of
him.  I saw that plain enough one time I was there and he brought
Margaret home from Radnor Friday night.  I guess they wouldn't
have liked anybody, though, who come after Margaret.  They
thought nobody was good enough for her.

"But Margaret coaxed them all round in time.  She could do pretty
near anything with them, they were so fond and proud of her.  Her
father held out the longest, but finally he give in and consented
for her to marry Ronald Fraser.

"They had a big wedding, too--all the neighbours were asked.
Margaret always liked to make a display.  I was her bridesmaid,
Master.  I helped her dress and nothing would please her; she
wanted to look that nice for Ronald's sake.  She was a handsome
bride; dressed in white, with red roses in her hair and at her
breast.  She wouldn't wear white flowers; she said they looked
too much like funeral flowers.  She looked like a picture.  I can
see her this minute, as plain as plain, just as she was that
night, blushing and turning pale by turns, and looking at Ronald
with her eyes of love.  If ever a girl loved a man with all her
heart Margaret Gordon did.  It almost made me feel frightened.
She gave him the worship it isn't right to give anybody but God,
Master, and I think that is always punished.

"They went to live at Radnor and for a little while everything
went well.  Margaret had a nice house, and was gay and happy.
She dressed beautiful and entertained a good deal.  Then--well,
Ronald Fraser's first wife turned up looking for him!  She wasn't
dead after all.

"Oh, there was terrible scandal, Master.  The talk and gossip was
something dreadful.  Every one you met had a different story, and
it was hard to get at the truth.  Some said Ronald Fraser had
known all the time that his wife wasn't dead, and had deceived
Margaret.  But I don't think he did.  He swore he didn't.  They
hadn't been very happy together, it seems.  Her mother made
trouble between them.  Then she went to visit her mother in
Montreal, and died in the hospital there, so the word came to
Ronald.  Perhaps he believed it a little too readily, but that he
DID believe it I never had a doubt.  Her story was that it was
another woman of the same name.  When she found out Ronald
thought her dead she and her mother agreed to let him think so.
But when she heard he had got married again she thought she'd
better let him know the truth.

"It all sounded like a queer story and I suppose you couldn't
blame people for not believing it too readily.  But I've always
felt it was true.  Margaret didn't think so, though.  She
believed that Ronald Fraser had deceived her, knowing all the
time that he couldn't make her his lawful wife.  She turned
against him and hated him just as much as she had loved him
before.

"Ronald Fraser went away with his real wife, and in less than a
year word came of his death.  They said he just died of a broken
heart, nothing more nor less.

"Margaret came home to her father's house.  From the day that she
went over its threshold, she never came out until she was carried
out in her coffin three years ago.  Not a soul outside of her own
family ever saw her again.  I went to see her, but Janet told me
she wouldn't see me.  It was foolish of Margaret to act so.  She
hadn't done anything real wrong; and everybody was sorry for her
and would have helped her all they could.  But I reckon pity cut
her as deep as blame could have done, and deeper, because you
see, Master, she was so proud she couldn't bear it.

"They say her father was hard on her, too; and that was unjust if
it was true.  Janet and Thomas felt the disgrace, too.  The
people that had been in the habit of going to the Gordon place
soon stopped going, for they could see they were not welcome.

"Old James Gordon died that winter.  He never held his head up
again after the scandal.  He had been an elder in the church, but
he handed in his resignation right away and nobody could persuade
him to withdraw it.

"Kilmeny was born in the spring, but nobody ever saw her, except
the minister who baptized her.  She was never taken to church or
sent to school.  Of course, I suppose there wouldn't have been
any use in her going to school when she couldn't speak, and it's
likely Margaret taught her all she could be taught herself.  But
it was dreadful that she was never taken to church, or let go
among the children and young folks.  And it was a real shame that
nothing was ever done to find out why she couldn't talk, or if
she could be cured.

"Margaret Gordon died three years ago, and everybody in Lindsay
went to the funeral.  But they didn't see her.  The coffin lid
was screwed down.  And they didn't see Kilmeny either.  I would
have loved to see HER for Margaret's sake, but I didn't want to
see poor Margaret.  I had never seen her since the night she was
a bride, for I had left Lindsay on a visit just after that, and
what I came home the scandal had just broken out.  I remembered
Margaret in all her pride and beauty, and I couldn't have borne
to look at her dead face and see the awful changes I knew must be
there.

"It was thought perhaps Janet and Thomas would take Kilmeny out
after her mother was gone, but they never did, so I suppose they
must have agreed with Margaret about the way she had been brought
up.  I've often felt sorry for the poor girl, and I don't think
her people did right by her, even if she was mysteriously
afflicted.  She must have had a very sad, lonely life.

"That is the story, Master, and I've been a long time telling it,
as I dare say you think.  But the past just seemed to be living
again for me as I talked.  If you don't want to be pestered with
questions about Kilmeny Gordon, Master, you'd better not let on
you've seen her."

Eric was not likely to.  He had heard all he wanted to know and
more.

"So this girl is at to core of a tragedy," he reflected, as he
went to his room.  "And she is dumb!  The pity of it!  Kilmeny!
The name suits her.  She is as lovely and innocent as the heroine
of the old ballad.  'And oh, Kilmeny was fair to see.'  But the
next line is certainly not so appropriate, for her eyes were
anything but 'still and steadfast'--after she had seen me, at all
events."

He tried to put her out of his thoughts, but he could not.  The
memory of her beautiful face drew him with a power he could not
resist.  The next evening he went again to the orchard.



CHAPTER VII. A ROSE OF WOMANHOOD

When he emerged from the spruce wood and entered the orchard his
heart gave a sudden leap, and he felt that the blood rushed madly
to his face.  She was there, bending over the bed of June lilies
in the centre of the garden plot.  He could only see her profile,
virginal and white.

He stopped, not wishing to startle her again.  When she lifted
her head he expected to see her shrink and flee, but she did not
do so; she only grew a little paler and stood motionless,
watching him intently.

Seeing this, he walked slowly towards her, and when he was so
close to her that he could hear the nervous flutter of her breath
over her parted, trembling lips, he said very gently,

"Do not be afraid of me.  I am a friend, and I do not wish to
disturb or annoy you in any way."

She seemed to hesitate a moment.  Then she lifted a little slate
that hung at her belt, wrote something on it rapidly, and held it
out to him.  He read, in a small distinctive handwriting,

"I am not afraid of you now.  Mother told me that all strange men
were very wicked and dangerous, but I do not think you can be.  I
have thought a great deal about you, and I am sorry I ran away
the other night."

He realized her entire innocence and simplicity.  Looking
earnestly into her still troubled eyes he said,

"I would not do you any harm for the world.  All men are not
wicked, although it is too true that some are so.  My name is
Eric Marshall and I am teaching in the Lindsay school.  You, I
think, are Kilmeny Gordon.  I thought your music so very lovely
the other evening that I have been wishing ever since that I
might hear it again.  Won't you play for me?"

The vague fear had all gone from her eyes by this time, and
suddenly she smiled--a merry, girlish, wholly irresistible smile,
which broke through the calm of her face like a gleam of sunlight
rippling over a placid sea.  Then she wrote, "I am very sorry
that I cannot play this evening.  I did not bring my violin with
me.  But I will bring it to-morrow evening and play for you if
you would like to hear me.  I should like to please you."

Again that note of innocent frankness!  What a child she
was--what a beautiful, ignorant child, utterly unskilled in the
art of hiding her feelings!  But why should she hide them?  They
were as pure and beautiful as herself.  Eric smiled back at her
with equal frankness.

"I should like it more than I can say, and I shall be sure to
come to-morrow evening if it is fine.  But if it is at all damp
or unpleasant you must not come.  In that case another evening
will do.  And now won't you give me some flowers?"

She nodded, with another little smile, and began to pick some of
the June lilies, carefully selecting the most perfect among them.
He watched her lithe, graceful motions with delight; every
movement seemed poetry itself.  She looked like a very
incarnation of Spring--as if all the shimmer of young leaves and
glow of young mornings and evanescent sweetness of young blossoms
in a thousand springs had been embodied in her.

When she came to him, radiant, her hands full of the lilies, a
couplet from a favourite poem darted into his head--

    "A blossom vermeil white
    That lightly breaks a faded flower sheath,
    Here, by God's rood, is the one maid for me."

The next moment he was angry with himself for his folly.  She
was, after all, nothing but a child--and a child set apart from
her fellow creatures by her sad defect.  He must not let himself
think nonsense.

"Thank you.  These June lilies are the sweetest flowers the
spring brings us.  Do you know that their real name is the white
narcissus?"  She looked pleased and interested.

"No, I did not know," she wrote.  "I have often read of the white
narcissus and wondered what it was like.  I never thought of it
being the same as my dear June lilies.  I am glad you told me.  I
love flowers very much.  They are my very good friends."

"You couldn't help being friends with the lilies.  Like always
takes to like," said Eric.  "Come and sit down on the old
bench--here, where you were sitting that night I frightened you
so badly.  I could not imagine who or what you were.  Sometimes I
thought I had dreamed you--only," he added under his breath and
unheard by her, "I could never have dreamed anything half so
lovely."

She sat down beside him on the old bench and looked unshrinkingly
in his face.  There was no boldness in her glance--nothing but
the most perfect, childlike trust and confidence.  If there had
been any evil in his heart--any skulking thought, he was afraid
to acknowledge--those eyes must have searched it out and shamed
it.  But he could meet them unafraid.  Then she wrote,

"I was very much frightened. You must have thought me very silly,
but I had never seen any man except Uncle Thomas and Neil and the
egg peddler.  And you are different from them--oh, very, very
different.  I was afraid to come back here the next evening.  And
yet, somehow, I wanted to come.  I did not want you to think I
did not know how to behave.  I sent Neil back for my bow in the
morning.  I could not do without it.  I cannot speak, you know.
Are you sorry?"

"I am very sorry for your sake."

"Yes, but what I mean is, would you like me better if I could
speak like other people?"

"No, it does not make any difference in that way, Kilmeny.  By
the way, do you mind my calling you Kilmeny?"

She looked puzzled and wrote, "What else should you call me?
That is my name.  Everybody calls me that."

"But I am such a stranger to you that perhaps you would wish me
to call you Miss Gordon."

"Oh, no, I would not like that," she wrote quickly, with a
distressed look on her face.  "Nobody ever calls me that.  It
would make me feel as if I were not myself but somebody else.
And you do not seem like a stranger to me.  Is there any reason
why you should not call me Kilmeny?"

"No reason whatever, if you will allow me the privilege.  You
have a very lovely name--the very name you ought to have."

"I am glad you like it.  Do you know that I was called after my
grandmother and she was called after a girl in a poem?  Aunt
Janet has never liked my name, although she liked my grandmother.
But I am glad you like both my name and me.  I was afraid you
would not like me because I cannot speak."

"You can speak through your music, Kilmeny."

She looked pleased.  "How well you understand," she wrote.  "Yes,
I cannot speak or sing as other people can, but I can make my
violin say things for me."

"Do you compose your own music?" he asked.  But he saw she did
not understand him.  "I mean, did any one ever teach you the
music you played here that evening?"

"Oh, no.  It just came as I thought.  It has always been that
way.  When I was very little Neil taught me to hold the violin
and the bow, and the rest all came of itself.  My violin once
belonged to Neil, but he gave it to me.  Neil is very good and
kind to me, but I like you better.  Tell me about yourself."

The wonder of her grew upon him with every passing moment.  How
lovely she was!  What dear little ways and gestures she had--ways
and gestures as artless and unstudied as they were effective.
And how strangely little her dumbness seemed to matter after all!
She wrote so quickly and easily, her eyes and smile gave such
expression to her mobile face, that voice was hardly missed.

They lingered in the orchard until the long, languid shadows of
the trees crept to their feet.  It was just after sunset and the
distant hills were purple against the melting saffron of the sky
in the west and the crystalline blue of the sky in the south.
Eastward, just over the fir woods, were clouds, white and high
heaped like snow mountains, and the westernmost of them shone
with a rosy glow as of sunset on an Alpine height.

The higher worlds of air were still full of light--perfect,
stainless light, unmarred of earth shadow; but down in the
orchard and under the spruces the light had almost gone, giving
place to a green, dewy dusk, made passionately sweet with the
breath of the apple blossoms and mint, and the balsamic odours
that rained down upon them from the firs.

Eric told her of his life, and the life in the great outer world,
in which she was girlishly and eagerly interested.  She asked him
many questions about it--direct and incisive questions which
showed that she had already formed decided opinions and views
about it.  Yet it was plain to be seen that she did not regard it
as anything she might ever share herself.  Hers was the
dispassionate interest with which she might have listened to a
tale of the land of fairy or of some great empire long passed
away from earth.

Eric discovered that she had read a great deal of poetry and
history, and a few books of biography and travel.  She did not
know what a novel meant and had never heard of one.  Curiously
enough, she was well informed regarding politics and current
events, from the weekly paper for which her uncle subscribed.

"I never read the newspaper while mother was alive," she wrote,
"nor any poetry either.  She taught me to read and write and I
read the Bible all through many times and some of the histories.
After mother died Aunt Janet gave me all her books.  She had a
great many.  Most of them had been given to her as prizes when
she was a girl at school, and some of them had been given to her
by my father.  Do you know the story of my father and mother?"

Eric nodded.

"Yes, Mrs. Williamson told me all about it. She was a friend of
your mother."

"I am glad you have heard it.  It is so sad that I would not like
to tell it, but you will understand everything better because you
know.  I never heard it until just before mother died.  Then she
told me all.  I think she had thought father was to blame for the
trouble; but before she died she told me she believed that she
had been unjust to him and that he had not known.  She said that
when people were dying they saw things more clearly and she saw
she had made a mistake about father.  She said she had many more
things she wanted to tell me, but she did not have time to tell
them because she died that night.  It was a long while before I
had the heart to read her books.  But when I did I thought them
so beautiful.  They were poetry and it was like music put into
words."

"I will bring you some books to read, if you would like them,"
said Eric.

Her great blue eyes gleamed with interest and delight.

"Oh, thank you, I would like it very much.  I have read mine over
so often that I know them nearly all by heart.  One cannot get
tired of really beautiful things, but sometimes I feel that I
would like some new books."

"Are you never lonely, Kilmeny?"

"Oh, no, how could I be?  There is always plenty for me to do,
helping Aunt Janet about the house.  I can do a great many
things"--she glanced up at him with a pretty pride as her flying
pencil traced the words.  "I can cook and sew.  Aunt Janet says I
am a very good housekeeper, and she does not praise people very
often or very much.  And then, when I am not helping her, I have
my dear, dear violin.  That is all the company I want.  But I
like to read and hear of the big world so far away and the people
who live there and the things that are done.  It must be a very
wonderful place."

"Wouldn't you like to go out into it and see its wonders and meet
those people yourself?" he asked, smiling at her.

At once he saw that, in some way he could not understand, he had
hurt her.  She snatched her pencil and wrote, with such swiftness
of motion and energy of expression that it almost seemed as if
she had passionately exclaimed the words aloud,

"No, no, no.  I do not want to go anywhere away from home.  I do
not want ever to see strangers or have them see me.  I could not
bear it."

He thought that possibly the consciousness of her defect
accounted for this.  Yet she did not seem sensitive about her
dumbness and made frequent casual references to it in her written
remarks.  Or perhaps it was the shadow on her birth.  Yet she was
so innocent that it seemed unlikely she could realize or
understand the existence of such a shadow.  Eric finally decided
that it was merely the rather morbid shrinking of a sensitive
child who had been brought up in an unwholesome and unnatural
way.  At last the lengthening shadows warned him that it was time
to go.

"You won't forget to come to-morrow evening and play for me," he
said, rising reluctantly.  She answered by a quick little shake
of her sleek, dark head, and a smile that was eloquent.  He
watched her as she walked across the orchard,

    "With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace,"

and along the wild cherry lane.  At the corner of the firs she
paused and waved her hand to him before turning it.

When Eric reached home old Robert Williamson was having a lunch
of bread and milk in the kitchen.  He looked up, with a friendly
grin, as Eric strode in, whistling.

"Been having a walk, Master?" he queried.

"Yes," said Eric.

Unconsciously and involuntarily he infused so much triumph into
the simple monosyllable that even old Robert felt it.  Mrs.
Williamson, who was cutting bread at the end of the table, laid
down her knife and loaf, and looked at the young man with a
softly troubled expression in her eyes.  She wondered if he had
been back to the Connors orchard--and if he could have seen
Kilmeny Gordon again.

"You didn't discover a gold mine, I s'pose?" said old Robert
dryly.  "You look as if you might have."



CHAPTER VIII. AT THE GATE OF EDEN

When Eric went to the old Connors orchard the next evening he
found Kilmeny waiting for him on the bench under the white lilac
tree, with the violin in her lap.  As soon as she saw him she
caught it up and began to play an airy delicate little melody
that sounded like the laughter of daisies.

When it was finished she dropped her bow, and looked up at him
with flushed cheeks and questioning eyes.

"What did that say to you?" she wrote.

"It said something like this," answered Eric, falling into her
humour smilingly.  "Welcome, my friend.  It is a very beautiful
evening.  The sky is so blue and the apple blossoms so sweet.
The wind and I have been here alone together and the wind is a
good companion, but still I am glad to see you.  It is an evening
on which it is good to be alive and to wander in an orchard that
is fine and white.  Welcome, my friend."

She clapped her hands, looking like a pleased child.

"You are very quick to understand," she wrote.  "That was just
what I meant.  Of course I did not think it in just those words,
but that was the FEELING of it.  I felt that I was so glad I was
alive, and that the apple blossoms and the white lilacs and the
trees and I were all pleased together to see you come.  You are
quicker than Neil.  He is almost always puzzled to understand my
music, and I am puzzled to understand his.  Sometimes it
frightens me.  It seems as if there were something in it trying
to take hold of me--something I do not like and want to run away
from."

Somehow Eric did not like her references to Neil.  The idea of
that handsome, low-born boy seeing Kilmeny every day, talking to
her, sitting at the same table with her, dwelling under the same
roof, meeting her in the hundred intimacies of daily life, was
distasteful to him.  He put the thought away from him, and flung
himself down on the long grass at her feet.

"Now play for me, please," he said.  "I want to lie here and
listen to you."

"And look at you," he might have added.  He could not tell which
was the greater pleasure.  Her beauty, more wonderful than any
pictured loveliness he had ever seen, delighted him.  Every tint
and curve and outline of her face was flawless.  Her music
enthralled him.  This child, he told himself as he listened, had
genius.  But it was being wholly wasted.  He found himself
thinking resentfully of the people who were her guardians, and
who were responsible for her strange life.  They had done her a
great and irremediable wrong.  How dared they doom her to such an
existence?  If her defect of utterance had been attended to in
time, who knew but that it might have been cured?  Now it was
probably too late.  Nature had given her a royal birthright of
beauty and talent, but their selfish and unpardonable neglect had
made it of no account.

What divine music she lured out of the old violin--merry and sad,
gay and sorrowful by turns, music such as the stars of morning
might have made singing together, music that the fairies might
have danced to in their revels among the green hills or on yellow
sands, music that might have mourned over the grave of a dead
hope.  Then she drifted into a still sweeter strain.  As he
listened to it he realized that the whole soul and nature of the
girl were revealing themselves to him through her music--the
beauty and purity of her thoughts, her childhood dreams and her
maiden reveries.  There was no thought of concealment about her;
she could not help the revelation she was unconscious of making.

At last she laid her violin aside and wrote,

"I have done my best to give you pleasure.  It is your turn now.
Do you remember a promise you made me last night?  Have you kept
it?"

He gave her the two books he had brought for her--a modern novel
and a volume of poetry unknown to her.  He had hesitated a little
over the former; but the book was so fine and full of beauty that
he thought it could not bruise the bloom of her innocence ever so
slightly.  He had no doubts about the poetry.  It was the
utterance of one of those great inspired souls whose passing
tread has made the kingdom of their birth and labour a veritable
Holy Land.

He read her some of the poems.  Then he talked to her of his
college days and friends.  The minutes passed very swiftly.
There was just then no world for him outside of that old orchard
with its falling blossoms and its shadows and its crooning winds.

Once, when he told her the story of some college pranks wherein
the endless feuds of freshmen and sophomores figured, she clapped
her hands together according to her habit, and laughed aloud--a
clear, musical, silvery peal.  It fell on Eric's ear with a shock
of surprise.  He thought it strange that she could laugh like
that when she could not speak.  Wherein lay the defect that
closed for her the gates of speech?  Was it possible that it
could be removed?

"Kilmeny," he said gravely after a moment's reflection, during
which he had looked up as she sat with the ruddy sunlight falling
through the lilac branches on her bare, silky head like a shower
of red jewels, "do you mind if I ask you something about your
inability to speak?  Will it hurt you to talk of the matter with
me?"

She shook her head.

"Oh, no," she wrote, "I do not mind at all.  Of course I am sorry
I cannot speak, but I am quite used to the thought and it never
hurts me at all."

"Then, Kilmeny, tell me this.  Do you know why it is that you are
unable to speak, when all your other faculties are so perfect?"

"No, I do not know at all why I cannot speak.  I asked mother once
and she told me it was a judgment on her for a great sin she had
committed, and she looked so strangely that I was frightened, and
I never spoke of it to her or anyone else again."

"Were you ever taken to a doctor to have your tongue and organs
of speech examined?"

"No. I remember when I was a very little girl that Uncle Thomas
wanted to take me to a doctor in Charlottetown and see if
anything could be done for me, but mother would not let him.  She
said it would be no use.  And I do not think Uncle Thomas thought
it would be, either."

"You can laugh very naturally.  Can you make any other sound?"

"Yes, sometimes.  When I am pleased or frightened I have made
little cries.  But it is only when I am not thinking of it at all
that I can do that.  If I TRY to make a sound I cannot do it at
all."

This seemed to Eric more mysterious than ever.

"Do you ever try to speak--to utter words?" he persisted.

"Oh yes, very often.  All the time I am saying the words in my
head, just as I hear other people saying them, but I never can
make my tongue say them.  Do not look so sorry, my friend.  I am
very happy and I do not mind so very much not being able to
speak--only sometimes when I have so many thoughts and it seems
so slow to write them out, some of them get away from me.  I must
play to you again.  You look too sober."

She laughed again, picked up her violin, and played a tinkling,
roguish little melody as if she were trying to tease him, looking
at Eric over her violin with luminous eyes that dared him to be
merry.

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."



CHAPTER IX. THE STRAIGHT SIMPLICITY OF EVE

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.

She assimilated the ideas in the books they read, speedily,
eagerly, and thoroughly, always seizing on the best and truest,
and rejecting the false and spurious and weak with an unfailing
intuition at which Eric marvelled.  Hers was the spear of
Ithuriel, trying out the dross of everything and leaving only the
pure gold.

In manner and outlook she was still a child.  Yet now and again
she was as old as Eve.  An expression would leap into her
laughing face, a subtle meaning reveal itself in her smile, that
held all the lore of womanhood and all the wisdom of the ages.

Her way of smiling enchanted him.  The smile always began far
down in her eyes and flowed outward to her face like a sparkling
brook stealing out of shadow into sunshine.

He knew everything about her life.  She told him her simple
history freely.  She often mentioned her uncle and aunt and
seemed to regard them with deep affection.  She rarely spoke of
her mother.  Eric came somehow to understand, less from what she
said than from what she did not say, that Kilmeny, though she had
loved her mother, had always been rather afraid of her.  There
had not been between them the natural beautiful confidence of
mother and child.

Of Neil, she wrote frequently at first, and seemed very fond of
him.  Later she ceased to mention him.  Perhaps--for she was
marvellously quick to catch and interpret every fleeting change
of expression in his voice and face--she discerned what Eric did
not know himself--that his eyes clouded and grew moody at the
mention of Neil's name.

Once she asked him naively,

"Are there many people like you out in the world?"

"Thousands of them," said Eric, laughing.

She looked gravely at him.  Then she gave her head a quick
decided little shake.

"I do not think so," she wrote.  "I do not know much of the world,
but I do not think there are many people like you in it."

One evening, when the far-away hills and fields were scarfed in
gauzy purples, and the intervales were brimming with golden
mists, Eric carried to the old orchard a little limp, worn volume
that held a love story.  It was the first thing of the kind he
had ever read to her, for in the first novel he had lent her the
love interest had been very slight and subordinate.  This was a
beautiful, passionate idyl exquisitely told.

He read it to her, lying in the grass at her feet; she listened
with her hands clasped over her knee and her eyes cast down.  It
was not a long story; and when he had finished it he shut the
book and looked up at her questioningly.

"Do you like it, Kilmeny?" he asked.

Very slowly she took her slate and wrote,

"Yes, I like it.  But it hurt me, too.  I did not know that a
person could like anything that hurt her.  I do not know why it
hurt me.  I felt as if I had lost something that I never had.
That was a very silly feeling, was it not?  But I did not
understand the book very well, you see.  It is about love and I
do not know anything about love.  Mother told me once that love
is a curse, and that I must pray that it would never enter into
my life.  She said it very earnestly, and so I believed her.  But
your book teaches that it is a blessing.  It says that it is the
most splendid and wonderful thing in life.  Which am I to
believe?"

"Love--real love--is never a curse, Kilmeny," said Eric gravely.
"There is a false love which IS a curse.  Perhaps your mother
believed it was that which had entered her life and ruined it;
and so she made the mistake.  There is nothing in the world--or
in heaven either, as I believe--so truly beautiful and wonderful
and blessed as love."

"Have you ever loved?" asked Kilmeny, with the directness of
phrasing necessitated by her mode of communication which was
sometimes a little terrible.  She asked the question simply and
without embarrassment.  She knew of no reason why love might not
be discussed with Eric as other matters--music and books and
travel--might be.

"No," said Eric--honestly, as he thought, "but every one has an
ideal of love whom he hopes to meet some day--'the ideal woman of
a young man's dream.'  I suppose I have mine, in some sealed,
secret chamber of my heart."

"I suppose your ideal woman would be beautiful, like the woman in
your book?"

"Oh, yes, I am sure I could never care for an ugly woman," said
Eric, laughing a little as he sat up.  "Our ideals are always
beautiful, whether they so translate themselves into realities or
not.  But the sun is going down.  Time does certainly fly in this
enchanted orchard.  I believe you bewitch the moments away,
Kilmeny.  Your namesake of the poem was a somewhat uncanny maid,
if I recollect aright, and thought as little of seven years in
elfland as ordinary folk do of half an hour on upper earth.  Some
day I shall waken from a supposed hour's lingering here and find
myself an old man with white hair and ragged coat, as in that
fairy tale we read the other night.  Will you let me give you
this book?  I should never commit the sacrilege of reading it in
any other place than this.  It is an old book, Kilmeny.  A new
book, savouring of the shop and market-place, however beautiful
it might be, would not do for you.  This was one of my mother's
books.  She read it and loved it.  See--the faded rose leaves she
placed in it one day are there still.  I'll write your name in
it--that quaint, pretty name of yours which always sounds as if
it had been specially invented for you--'Kilmeny of the
Orchard'--and the date of this perfect June day on which we read
it together.  Then when you look at it you will always remember
me, and the white buds opening on that rosebush beside you, and
the rush and murmur of the wind in the tops of those old
spruces."

He held out the book to her, but, to his surprise, she shook her
head, with a deeper flush on her face.

"Won't you take the book, Kilmeny?  Why not?"

She took her pencil and wrote slowly, unlike her usual quick
movement.

"Do not be offended with me.  I shall not need anything to make
me remember you because I can never forget you.  But I would
rather not take the book.  I do not want to read it again.  It is
about love, and there is no use in my learning about love, even
if it is all you say.  Nobody will ever love me.  I am too ugly."

"You!  Ugly!" exclaimed Eric.  He was on the point of going off
into a peal of laughter at the idea when a glimpse of her half
averted face sobered him.  On it was a hurt, bitter look, such as
he remembered seeing once before, when he had asked her if she
would not like to see the world for herself.

"Kilmeny," he said in astonishment, "you don't really think
yourself ugly, do you?"

She nodded, without looking at him, and then wrote,

"Oh, yes, I know that I am.  I have known it for a long time.
Mother told me that I was very ugly and that nobody would ever
like to look at me.  I am sorry.  It hurts me much worse to know
I am ugly than it does to know I cannot speak.  I suppose you
will think that is very foolish of me, but it is true.  That was
why I did not come back to the orchard for such a long time, even
after I had got over my fright.  I hated to think that YOU would
think me ugly.  And that is why I do not want to go out into the
world and meet people.  They would look at me as the egg peddler
did one day when I went out with Aunt Janet to his wagon the
spring after mother died.  He stared at me so.  I knew it was
because he thought me so ugly, and I have always hidden when he
came ever since."

Eric's lips twitched. In spite of his pity for the real suffering
displayed in her eyes, he could not help feeling amused over the
absurd idea of this beautiful girl believing herself in all
seriousness to be ugly.

"But, Kilmeny, do you think yourself ugly when you look in a
mirror?" he asked smiling.

"I have never looked in a mirror," she wrote.  "I never knew
there was such a thing until after mother died, and I read about
it in a book.  Then I asked Aunt Janet and she said mother had
broken all the looking glasses in the house when I was a baby.
But I have seen my face reflected in the spoons, and in a little
silver sugar bowl Aunt Janet has.  And it IS ugly--very ugly."

Eric's face went down into the grass.  For his life he could not
help laughing; and for his life he would not let Kilmeny see him
laughing.  A certain little whimsical wish took possession of him
and he did not hasten to tell her the truth, as had been his
first impulse.  Instead, when he dared to look up he said slowly,

"I don't think you are ugly, Kilmeny."

"Oh, but I am sure you must," she wrote protestingly.  "Even Neil
does.  He tells me I am kind and nice, but one day I asked him if
he thought me very ugly, and he looked away and would not speak,
so I knew what he thought about it, too.  Do not let us speak of
this again.  It makes me feel sorry and spoils everything.  I
forget it at other times.  Let me play you some good-bye music,
and do not feel vexed because I would not take your book.  It
would only make me unhappy to read it."

"I am not vexed," said Eric, "and I think you will take it some
day yet--after I have shown you something I want you to see.
Never mind about your looks, Kilmeny.  Beauty isn't everything."

"Oh, it is a great deal," she wrote naively.  "But you do like
me, even though I am so ugly, don't you?  You like me because of
my beautiful music, don't you?"

"I like you very much, Kilmeny," answered Eric, laughing a
little; but there was in his voice a tender note of which he was
unconscious.  Kilmeny was aware of it, however, and she picked up
her violin with a pleased smile.

He left her playing there, and all the way through the dim
resinous spruce wood her music followed him like an invisible
guardian spirit.

"Kilmeny the Beautiful!" he murmured, "and yet, good heavens, the
child thinks she is ugly--she with a face more lovely than ever
an artist dreamed of!  A girl of eighteen who has never looked in
a mirror!  I wonder if there is another such in any civilized
country in the world.  What could have possessed her mother to
tell her such a falsehood?  I wonder if Margaret Gordon could
have been quite sane.  It is strange that Neil has never told her
the truth.  Perhaps he doesn't want her to find out."

Eric had met Neil Gordon a few evenings before this, at a country
dance where Neil had played the violin for the dancers.
Influenced by curiosity he had sought the lad's acquaintance.
Neil was friendly and talkative at first; but at the first hint
concerning the Gordons which Eric threw out skilfully his face
and manner changed.  He looked secretive and suspicious, almost
sinister.  A sullen look crept into his big black eyes and he
drew his bow across the violin strings with a discordant screech,
as if to terminate the conversation.  Plainly nothing was to be
found out from him about Kilmeny and her grim guardians.



CHAPTER X. A TROUBLING OF THE WATERS

One evening in late June Mrs. Williamson was sitting by her
kitchen window.  Her knitting lay unheeded in her lap, and
Timothy, though he nestled ingratiatingly against her foot as he
lay on the rug and purred his loudest, was unregarded.  She
rested her face on her hand and looked out of the window, across
the distant harbour, with troubled eyes.

"I guess I must speak," she thought wistfully.  "I hate to do it.
I always did hate meddling.  My mother always used to say that
ninety-nine times out of a hundred the last state of a meddler
and them she meddled with was worse than the first.  But I guess
it's my duty.  I was Margaret's friend, and it is my duty to
protect her child any way I can.  If the Master does go back
across there to meet her I must tell him what I think about it."

Overhead in his room, Eric was walking about whistling.
Presently he came downstairs, thinking of the orchard, and the
girl who would be waiting for him there.

As he crossed the little front entry he heard Mrs. Williamson's
voice calling to him.

"Mr. Marshall, will you please come here a moment?"

He went out to the kitchen.  Mrs. Williamson looked at him
deprecatingly.  There was a flush on her faded cheek and her
voice trembled.

"Mr. Marshall, I want to ask you a question.  Perhaps you will
think it isn't any of my business.  But it isn't because I want
to meddle.  No, no.  It is only because I think I ought to speak.
I have thought it over for a long time, and it seems to me that I
ought to speak.  I hope you won't be angry, but even if you are I
must say what I have to say.  Are you going back to the old
Connors orchard to meet Kilmeny Gordon?"

For a moment an angry flush burned in Eric's face.  It was more
Mrs. Williamson's tone than her words which startled and annoyed
him.

"Yes, I am, Mrs. Williamson," he said coldly.  "What of it?"

"Then, sir," said Mrs. Williamson with more firmness, "I have got
to tell you that I don't think you are doing right.  I have been
suspecting all along that that was where you went every evening,
but I haven't said a word to any one about it.  Even my husband
doesn't know.  But tell me this, Master.  Do Kilmeny's uncle and
aunt know that you are meeting her there?"

"Why," said Eric, in some confusion, "I--I do not know whether
they do or not.  But Mrs. Williamson, surely you do not suspect
me of meaning any harm or wrong to Kilmeny Gordon?"

"No, I don't, Master.  I might think it of some men, but never of
you.  I don't for a minute think that you would do her or any
woman any wilful wrong.  But you may do her great harm for all
that.  I want you to stop and think about it.  I guess you
haven't thought.  Kilmeny can't know anything about the world or
about men, and she may get to thinking too much of you.  That
might break her heart, because you couldn't ever marry a dumb
girl like her.  So I don't think you ought to be meeting her so
often in this fashion.  It isn't right, Master.  Don't go to the
orchard again."

Without a word Eric turned away, and went upstairs to his room.
Mrs. Williamson picked up her knitting with a sigh.

"That's done, Timothy, and I'm real thankful," she said.  "I
guess there'll be no need of saying anything more.  Mr. Marshall
is a fine young man, only a little thoughtless.  Now that he's
got his eyes opened I'm sure he'll do what is right.  I don't
want Margaret's child made unhappy."

Her husband came to the kitchen door and sat down on the steps to
enjoy his evening smoke, talking between whiffs to his wife of
Elder Tracy's church row, and Mary Alice Martin's beau, the price
Jake Crosby was giving for eggs, the quantity of hay yielded by
the hill meadow, the trouble he was having with old Molly's calf,
and the respective merits of Plymouth Rock and Brahma roosters.
Mrs. Williamson answered at random, and heard not one word in
ten.

"What's got the Master, Mother?" inquired old Robert, presently.
"I hear him striding up and down in his room 'sif he was caged.
Sure you didn't lock him in by mistake?"

"Maybe he's worried over the way Seth Tracy's acting in school,"
suggested Mrs. Williamson, who did not choose that her gossipy
husband should suspect the truth about Eric and Kilmeny Gordon.

"Shucks, he needn't worry a morsel over that.  Seth'll quiet down
as soon as he finds he can't run the Master.  He's a rare good
teacher--better'n Mr. West was even, and that's saying something.
The trustees are hoping he'll stay for another term.  They're
going to ask him at the school meeting to-morrow, and offer him a
raise of supplement."

Upstairs, in his little room under the eaves, Eric Marshall was
in the grip of the most intense and overwhelming emotion he had
ever experienced.

Up and down, to and fro, he walked, with set lips and clenched
hands.  When he was wearied out he flung himself on a chair by
the window and wrestled with the flood of feeling.

Mrs. Williamson's words had torn away the delusive veil with
which he had bound his eyes.  He was face to face with the
knowledge that he loved Kilmeny Gordon with the love that comes
but once, and is for all time.  He wondered how he could have
been so long blind to it.  He knew that he must have loved her
ever since their first meeting that May evening in the old
orchard.

And he knew that he must choose between two alternatives--either
he must never go to the orchard again, or he must go as an avowed
lover to woo him a wife.

Worldly prudence, his inheritance from a long line of thrifty,
cool-headed ancestors, was strong in Eric, and he did not yield
easily or speedily to the dictates of his passion.  All night he
struggled against the new emotions that threatened to sweep away
the "common sense" which David Baker had bade him take with him
when he went a-wooing.  Would not a marriage with Kilmeny Gordon
be an unwise thing from any standpoint?

Then something stronger and greater and more vital than wisdom or
unwisdom rose up in him and mastered him.  Kilmeny, beautiful,
dumb Kilmeny was, as he had once involuntarily thought, "the one
maid" for him.  Nothing should part them.  The mere idea of never
seeing her again was so unbearable that he laughed at himself for
having counted it a possible alternative.

"If I can win Kilmeny's love I shall ask her to be my wife," he
said, looking out of the window to the dark, southwestern hill
beyond which lay his orchard.

The velvet sky over it was still starry; but the water of the
harbour was beginning to grow silvery in the reflection of the
dawn that was breaking in the east.

"Her misfortune will only make her dearer to me.  I cannot
realize that a month ago I did not know her.  It seems to me that
she has been a part of my life for ever.  I wonder if she was
grieved that I did not go to the orchard last night--if she
waited for me.  If she does, she does not know it herself yet.
It will be my sweet task to teach her what love means, and no man
has ever had a lovelier, purer, pupil."

At the annual school meeting, the next afternoon, the trustees
asked Eric to take the Lindsay school for the following year.  He
consented unhesitatingly.

That evening he went to Mrs. Williamson, as she washed her tea
dishes in the kitchen.

"Mrs. Williamson, I am going back to the old Connors orchard to
see Kilmeny again to-night."

She looked at him reproachfully.

"Well, Master, I have no more to say.  I suppose it wouldn't be
of any use if I had.  But you know what I think of it."

"I intend to marry Kilmeny Gordon if I can win her."

An expression of amazement came into the good woman's face.  She
looked scrutinizingly at the firm mouth and steady gray eyes for
a moment.  Then she said in a troubled voice,

"Do you think that is wise, Master?  I suppose Kilmeny is pretty;
the egg peddler told me she was; and no doubt she is a good, nice
girl.  But she wouldn't be a suitable wife for you--a girl that
can't speak."

"That doesn't make any difference to me."

"But what will your people say?"

"I have no 'people' except my father.  When he sees Kilmeny he
will understand.  She is all the world to me, Mrs. Williamson."

"As long as you believe that there is nothing more to be said,"
was the quiet answer, "I'd be a little bit afraid if I was you,
though.  But young people never think of those things."

"My only fear is that she won't care for me," said Eric soberly.

Mrs. Williamson surveyed the handsome, broad-shouldered young man
shrewdly.

"I don't think there are many women would say you 'no', Master.
I wish you well in your wooing, though I can't help thinking
you're doing a daft-like thing.  I hope you won't have any
trouble with Thomas and Janet.  They are so different from other
folks there is no knowing.  But take my advice, Master, and go
and see them about it right off.  Don't go on meeting Kilmeny
unbeknownst to them."

"I shall certainly take your advice," said Eric, gravely.  "I
should have gone to them before.  It was merely thoughtlessness
on my part.  Possibly they do know already.  Kilmeny may have
told them."

Mrs. Williamson shook her head decidedly.

"No, no, Master, she hasn't.  They'd never have let her go on
meeting you there if they had known.  I know them too well to
think of that for a moment.  Go you straight to them and say to
them just what you have said to me.  That is your best plan,
Master.  And take care of Neil.  People say he has a notion of
Kilmeny himself.  He'll do you a bad turn if he can, I've no
doubt.  Them foreigners can't be trusted--and he's just as much a
foreigner as his parents before him--though he HAS been brought
up on oatmeal and the shorter catechism, as the old saying has
it.  I feel that somehow--I always feel it when I look at him
singing in the choir."

"Oh, I am not afraid of Neil," said Eric carelessly.  "He
couldn't help loving Kilmeny--nobody could."

"I suppose every young man thinks that about his girl--if he's
the right sort of young man," said Mrs. Williamson with a little
sigh.

She watched Eric out of sight anxiously.

"I hope it'll all come out right," she thought.  "I hope he ain't
making an awful mistake--but--I'm afraid.  Kilmeny must be very
pretty to have bewitched him so.  Well, I suppose there is no use
in my worrying over it.  But I do wish he had never gone back to
that old orchard and seen her."



CHAPTER XI. A LOVER AND HIS LASS

Kilmeny was in the orchard when Eric reached it, and he lingered
for a moment in the shadow of the spruce wood to dream over her
beauty.

The orchard had lately overflowed in waves of old-fashioned
caraway, and she was standing in the midst of its sea of bloom,
with the lace-like blossoms swaying around her in the wind.  She
wore the simple dress of pale blue print in which he had first
seen her; silk attire could not better have become her
loveliness.  She had woven herself a chaplet of half open white
rosebuds and placed it on her dark hair, where the delicate
blossoms seemed less wonderful than her face.

When Eric stepped through the gap she ran to meet him with
outstretched hands, smiling.  He took her hands and looked into
her eyes with an expression before which hers for the first time
faltered.  She looked down, and a warm blush strained the ivory
curves of her cheek and throat.  His heart bounded, for in that
blush he recognized the banner of love's vanguard.

"Are you glad to see me, Kilmeny?" he asked, in a low significant
tone.

She nodded, and wrote in a somewhat embarrassed fashion,

"Yes.  Why do you ask?  You know I am always glad to see you.  I
was afraid you would not come.  You did not come last night and I
was so sorry.  Nothing in the orchard seemed nice any longer.  I
couldn't even play.  I tried to, and my violin only cried.  I
waited until it was dark and then I went home."

"I am sorry you were disappointed, Kilmeny.  I couldn't come last
night.  Some day I shall tell you why.  I stayed home to learn a
new lesson.  I am sorry you missed me--no, I am glad.  Can you
understand how a person may be glad and sorry for the same
thing?"

She nodded again, with a return of her usual sweet composure.

"Yes, I could not have understood once, but I can now.  Did you
learn your new lesson?"

"Yes, very thoroughly.  It was a delightful lesson when I once
understood it.  I must try to teach it to you some day.  Come
over to the old bench, Kilmeny.  There is something I want to say
to you. But first, will you give me a rose?"

She ran to the bush, and, after careful deliberation, selected a
perfect half-open bud and brought it to him--a white bud with a
faint, sunrise flush about its golden heart.

"Thank you.  It is as beautiful as--as a woman I know," Eric
said.

A wistful look came into her face at his words, and she walked
with a drooping head across the orchard to the bench.

"Kilmeny," he said, seriously, "I am going to ask you to do
something for me.  I want you to take me home with you and
introduce me to your uncle and aunt."

She lifted her head and stared at him incredulously, as if he had
asked her to do something wildly impossible.  Understanding from
his grave face that he meant what he said, a look of dismay
dawned in her eyes.  She shook her head almost violently and
seemed to be making a passionate, instinctive effort to speak.
Then she caught up her pencil and wrote with feverish haste:

"I cannot do that.  Do not ask me to.  You do not understand.
They would be very angry.  They do not want to see any one coming
to the house.  And they would never let me come here again.  Oh,
you do not mean it?"

He pitied her for the pain and bewilderment in her eyes; but he
took her slender hands in his and said firmly,

"Yes, Kilmeny, I do mean it.  It is not quite right for us to be
meeting each other here as we have been doing, without the
knowledge and consent of your friends.  You cannot now understand
this, but--believe me--it is so."

She looked questioningly, pityingly into his eyes.  What she read
there seemed to convince her, for she turned very pale and an
expression of hopelessness came into her face.  Releasing her
hands, she wrote slowly,

"If you say it is wrong I must believe it.  I did not know
anything so pleasant could be wrong.  But if it is wrong we must
not meet here any more.  Mother told me I must never do anything
that was wrong. But I did not know this was wrong."

"It was not wrong for you, Kilmeny.  But it was a little wrong
for me, because I knew better--or rather, should have known
better.  I didn't stop to think, as the children say.  Some day
you will understand fully.  Now, you will take me to your uncle
and aunt, and after I have said to them what I want to say it
will be all right for us to meet here or anywhere."

She shook her head.

"No," she wrote, "Uncle Thomas and Aunt Janet will tell you to go
away and never come back.  And they will never let me come here
any more.  Since it is not right to meet you I will not come, but
it is no use to think of going to them.  I did not tell them
about you because I knew that they would forbid me to see you,
but I am sorry, since it is so wrong."

"You must take me to them," said Eric firmly.  "I am quite sure
that things will not be as you fear when they hear what I have to
say."

Uncomforted, she wrote forlornly,

"I must do it, since you insist, but I am sure it will be no use.
I cannot take you to-night because they are away.  They went to
the store at Radnor.  But I will take you to-morrow night; and
after that I shall not see you any more."

Two great tears brimmed over in her big blue eyes and splashed
down on her slate.  Her lips quivered like a hurt child's.  Eric
put his arm impulsively about her and drew her head down upon his
shoulder.  As she cried there, softly, miserably, he pressed his
lips to the silky black hair with its coronal of rosebuds.  He
did not see two burning eyes which were looking at him over the
old fence behind him with hatred and mad passion blazing in their
depths.  Neil Gordon was crouched there, with clenched hands and
heaving breast, watching them.

"Kilmeny, dear, don't cry," said Eric tenderly.  "You shall see
me again.  I promise you that, whatever happens.  I do not think
your uncle and aunt will be as unreasonable as you fear, but even
if they are they shall not prevent me from meeting you somehow."

Kilmeny lifted her head, and wiped the tears from her eyes.

"You do not know what they are like," she wrote.  "They will lock
me into my room.  That is the way they always punished me when I
was a little girl.  And once, not so very long ago, when I was a
big girl, they did it."

"If they do I'll get you out somehow," said Eric, laughing a
little.

She allowed herself to smile, but it was a rather forlorn little
effort.  She did not cry any more, but her spirits did not come
back to her.  Eric talked gaily, but she only listened in a
pensive, absent way, as if she scarcely heard him.  When he asked
her to play she shook her head.

"I cannot think any music to-night," she wrote, "I must go home,
for my head aches and I feel very stupid."

"Very well, Kilmeny.  Now, don't worry, little girl.  It will all
come out all right."

Evidently she did not share his confidence, for her head drooped
again as they walked together across the orchard.  At the
entrance of the wild cherry lane she paused and looked at him
half reproachfully, her eyes filling again.  She seemed to be
bidding him a mute farewell.  With an impulse of tenderness which
he could not control, Eric put his arm about her and kissed her
red, trembling mouth.  She started back with a little cry.  A
burning colour swept over her face, and the next moment she fled
swiftly up the darkening lane.

The sweetness of that involuntary kiss clung to Eric's lips as he
went homeward, half-intoxicating him.  He knew that it had opened
the gates of womanhood to Kilmeny.  Never again, he felt, would
her eyes meet his with their old unclouded frankness.  When next
he looked into them he knew that he should see there the
consciousness of his kiss.  Behind her in the orchard that night
Kilmeny had left her childhood.



CHAPTER XII. A PRISONER OF LOVE

When Eric betook himself to the orchard the next evening he had
to admit that he felt rather nervous.  He did not know how the
Gordons would receive him and certainly the reports he had heard
of them were not encouraging, to say the least of it.  Even Mrs.
Williamson, when he had told her where he was going, seemed to
look upon him as one bent on bearding a lion in his den.

"I do hope they won't be very uncivil to you, Master," was the
best she could say.

He expected Kilmeny to be in the orchard before him, for he had
been delayed by a call from one of the trustees; but she was
nowhere to be seen.  He walked across it to the wild cherry lane;
but at its entrance he stopped short in sudden dismay.

Neil Gordon had stepped from behind the trees and stood
confronting him, with blazing eyes, and lips which writhed in
emotion so great that at first it prevented him from speaking.

With a thrill of dismay Eric instantly understood what must have
taken place.  Neil had discovered that he and Kilmeny had been
meeting in the orchard, and beyond doubt had carried that tale to
Janet and Thomas Gordon.  He realized how unfortunate it was that
this should have happened before he had had time to make his own
explanation.  It would probably prejudice Kilmeny's guardians
still further against him.  At this point in his thoughts Neil's
pent up passion suddenly found vent in a burst of wild words.

"So you've come to meet her again.  But she isn't here--you'll
never see her again!  I hate you--I hate you--I hate you!"

His voice rose to a shrill scream.  He took a furious step nearer
Eric as if he would attack him.  Eric looked steadily in his eyes
with a calm defiance, before which his wild passion broke like
foam on a rock.

"So you have been making trouble for Kilmeny, Neil, have you?"
said Eric contemptuously.  "I suppose you have been playing the
spy.  And I suppose that you have told her uncle and aunt that
she has been meeting me here.  Well, you have saved me the
trouble of doing it, that is all.  I was going to tell them
myself, tonight.  I don't know what your motive in doing this has
been.  Was it jealousy of me?  Or have you done it out of malice
to Kilmeny?"

His contempt cowed Neil more effectually than any display of
anger could have done.

"Never you mind why I did it," he muttered sullenly.  "What I did
or why I did it is no business of yours.  And you have no
business to come sneaking around here either.  Kilmeny won't meet
you here again."

"She will meet me in her own home then," said Eric sternly.
"Neil, in behaving as you have done you have shown yourself to be
a very foolish, undisciplined boy.  I am going straightway to
Kilmeny's uncle and aunt to explain everything."

Neil sprang forward in his path.

"No--no--go away," he implored wildly.  "Oh, sir--oh, Mr.
Marshall, please go away.  I'll do anything for you if you will.
I love Kilmeny.  I've loved her all my life.  I'd give my life
for her.  I can't have you coming here to steal her from me.  If
you do--I'll kill you!  I wanted to kill you last night when I
saw you kiss her.  Oh, yes, I saw you.  I was watching--spying,
if you like.  I don't care what you call it.  I had followed
her--I suspected something.  She was so different--so changed.
She never would wear the flowers I picked for her any more.  She
seemed to forget I was there.  I knew something had come between
us.  And it was you, curse you!  Oh, I'll make you sorry for it."

He was working himself up into a fury again--the untamed fury of
the Italian peasant thwarted in his heart's desire.  It overrode
all the restraint of his training and environment.  Eric, amid
all his anger and annoyance, felt a thrill of pity for him.  Neil
Gordon was only a boy still; and he was miserable and beside
himself.

"Neil, listen to me," he said quietly.  "You are talking very
foolishly.  It is not for you to say who shall or shall not be
Kilmeny's friend.  Now, you may just as well control yourself and
go home like a decent fellow.  I am not at all frightened by your
threats, and I shall know how to deal with you if you persist in
interfering with me or persecuting Kilmeny.  I am not the sort of
person to put up with that, my lad."

The restrained power in his tone and look cowed Neil.  The latter
turned sullenly away, with another muttered curse, and plunged
into the shadow of the firs.

Eric, not a little ruffled under all his external composure by
this most unexpected and unpleasant encounter, pursued his way
along the lane which wound on by the belt of woodland in twist
and curve to the Gordon homestead.  His heart beat as he thought
of Kilmeny.  What might she not be suffering?  Doubtless Neil had
given a very exaggerated and distorted account of what he had
seen, and probably her dour relations were very angry with her,
poor child.  Anxious to avert their wrath as soon as might be, he
hurried on, almost forgetting his meeting with Neil.  The threats
of the latter did not trouble him at all.  He thought the angry
outburst of a jealous boy mattered but little.  What did matter
was that Kilmeny was in trouble which his heedlessness had
brought upon her.

Presently he found himself before the Gordon house.  It was an
old building with sharp eaves and dormer windows, its shingles
stained a dark gray by long exposure to wind and weather.  Faded
green shutters hung on the windows of the lower story.  Behind it
grew a thick wood of spruces.  The little yard in front of it was
grassy and prim and flowerless; but over the low front door a
luxuriant early-flowering rose vine clambered, in a riot of
blood-red blossom which contrasted strangely with the general
bareness of its surroundings.  It seemed to fling itself over the
grim old house as if intent on bombarding it with an alien life
and joyousness.

Eric knocked at the door, wondering if it might be possible that
Kilmeny should come to it.  But a moment later it was opened by
an elderly woman--a woman of rigid lines from the hem of her
lank, dark print dress to the crown of her head, covered with
black hair which, despite its few gray threads, was still thick
and luxuriant.  She had a long, pale face somewhat worn and
wrinkled, but possessing a certain harsh comeliness of feature
which neither age nor wrinkles had quite destroyed; and her
deep-set, light gray eyes were not devoid of suggested
kindliness, although they now surveyed Eric with an unconcealed
hostility.  Her figure, in its merciless dress, was very angular;
yet there was about her a dignity of carriage and manner which
Eric liked.  In any case, he preferred her unsmiling dourness to
vulgar garrulity.

He lifted his hat.

"Have I the honour of speaking to Miss Gordon?" he asked.

"I am Janet Gordon," said the woman stiffly.

"Then I wish to talk with you and your brother."

"Come in."

She stepped aside and motioned him to a low brown door opening on
the right.

"Go in and sit down.  I'll call Thomas," she said coldly, as she
walked out through the hall.

Eric walked into the parlour and sat down as bidden.  He found
himself in the most old-fashioned room he had ever seen.  The
solidly made chairs and tables, of some wood grown dark and
polished with age, made even Mrs. Williamson's "parlour set" of
horsehair seem extravagantly modern by contrast.  The painted
floor was covered with round braided rugs.  On the centre table
was a lamp, a Bible and some theological volumes contemporary
with the square-runged furniture.  The walls, wainscoted half way
up in wood and covered for the rest with a dark, diamond-
patterned paper, were hung with faded engravings, mostly
of clerical-looking, bewigged personages in gowns and bands.

But over the high, undecorated black mantel-piece, in a ruddy
glow of sunset light striking through the window, hung one which
caught and held Eric's attention to the exclusion of everything
else.  It was the enlarged "crayon" photograph of a young girl,
and, in spite of the crudity of execution, it was easily the
center of interest in the room.

Eric at once guessed that this must be the picture of Margaret
Gordon, for, although quite unlike Kilmeny's sensitive, spirited
face in general, there was a subtle, unmistakable resemblance
about brow and chin.

The pictured face was a very handsome one, suggestive of velvety
dark eyes and vivid colouring; but it was its expression rather
than its beauty which fascinated Eric.  Never had he seen a
countenance indicative of more intense and stubborn will power.
Margaret Gordon was dead and buried; the picture was a cheap and
inartistic production in an impossible frame of gilt and plush;
yet the vitality in that face dominated its surroundings still.
What then must have been the power of such a personality in life?

Eric realized that this woman could and would have done
whatsoever she willed, unflinchingly and unrelentingly.  She
could stamp her desire on everything and everybody about her,
moulding them to her wish and will, in their own despite and in
defiance of all the resistance they might make.  Many things in
Kilmeny's upbringing and temperament became clear to him.

"If that woman had told me I was ugly I should have believed
her," he thought.  "Ay, even though I had a mirror to contradict
her.  I should never have dreamed of disputing or questioning
anything she might have said.  The strange power in her face is
almost uncanny, peering out as it does from a mask of beauty and
youthful curves.  Pride and stubbornness are its salient
characteristics.  Well, Kilmeny does not at all resemble her
mother in expression and only very slightly in feature."

His reflections were interrupted by the entrance of Thomas and
Janet Gordon.  The latter had evidently been called from his
work.  He nodded without speaking, and the two sat gravely down
before Eric.

"I have come to see you with regard to your niece, Mr. Gordon,"
he said abruptly, realizing that there would be small use in
beating about the bush with this grim pair.  "I met your--I met
Neil Gordon in the Connors orchard, and I found that he has told
you that I have been meeting Kilmeny there."

He paused.  Thomas Gordon nodded again; but he did not speak, and
he did not remove his steady, piercing eyes from the young man's
flushed countenance.  Janet still sat in a sort of expectant
immovability.

"I fear that you have formed an unfavourable opinion of me on
this account, Mr. Gordon," Eric went on.  "But I hardly think I
deserve it.  I can explain the matter if you will allow me.  I
met your niece accidentally in the orchard three weeks ago and
heard her play.  I thought her music very wonderful and I fell
into the habit of coming to the orchard in the evenings to hear
it.  I had no thought of harming her in any way, Mr. Gordon.  I
thought of her as a mere child, and a child who was doubly sacred
because of her affliction.  But recently I--I--it occurred to me
that I was not behaving quite honourably in encouraging her to
meet me thus.  Yesterday evening I asked her to bring me here and
introduce me to you and her aunt.  We would have come then if you
had been at home.  As you were not we arranged to come tonight."

"I hope you will not refuse me the privilege of seeing your
niece, Mr. Gordon," said Eric eagerly.  "I ask you to allow me
to visit her here.  But I do not ask you to receive me as a
friend on my own recommendations only.  I will give you
references--men of standing in Charlottetown and Queenslea. If
you refer to them--"

"I don't need to do that," said Thomas Gordon, quietly.  "I know
more of you than you think, Master.  I know your father well by
reputation and I have seen him.  I know you are a rich man's son,
whatever your whim in teaching a country school may be.  Since
you have kept your own counsel about your affairs I supposed you
didn't want your true position generally known, and so I have
held my tongue about you.  I know no ill of you, Master, and I
think none, now that I believe you were not beguiling Kilmeny to
meet you unknown to her friends of set purpose.  But all this
doesn't make you a suitable friend for her, sir--it makes you all
the more unsuitable.  The less she sees of you the better."

Eric almost started to his feet in an indignant protest; but he
swiftly remembered that his only hope of winning Kilmeny lay in
bringing Thomas Gordon to another way of thinking.  He had got on
better than he had expected so far; he must not now jeopardize
what he had gained by rashness or impatience.

"Why do you think so, Mr. Gordon?" he asked, regaining his
self-control with an effort.

"Well, plain speaking is best, Master.  If you were to come here
and see Kilmeny often she'd most likely come to think too much of
you.  I mistrust there's some mischief done in that direction
already.  Then when you went away she might break her heart--for
she is one of those who feel things deeply.  She has been happy
enough.  I know folks condemn us for the way she has been brought
up, but they don't know everything.  It was the best way for her,
all things considered.  And we don't want her made unhappy,
Master."

"But I love your niece and I want to marry her if I can win her
love," said Eric steadily.

He surprised them out of their self possession at last.  Both
started, and looked at him as if they could not believe the
evidence of their ears.

"Marry her! Marry Kilmeny!" exclaimed Thomas Gordon
incredulously.  "You can't mean it, sir.  Why, she is
dumb--Kilmeny is dumb."

"That makes no difference in my love for her, although I deeply
regret it for her own sake," answered Eric.  "I can only repeat
what I have already said, Mr. Gordon.  I want Kilmeny for my
wife."

The older man leaned forward and looked at the floor in a
troubled fashion, drawing his bushy eyebrows down and tapping the
calloused tips of his fingers together uneasily.  He was
evidently puzzled by this unexpected turn of the conversation,
and in grave doubt what to say.

"What would your father say to all this, Master?" he queried at
last.

"I have often heard my father say that a man must marry to please
himself," said Eric, with a smile.  "If he felt tempted to go
back on that opinion I think the sight of Kilmeny would convert
him.  But, after all, it is what I say that matters in this case,
isn't it, Mr. Gordon?  I am well educated and not afraid of work.
I can make a home for Kilmeny in a few years even if I have to
depend entirely on my own resources.  Only give me the chance to
win her--that is all I ask."

"I don't think it would do, Master," said Thomas Gordon, shaking
his head.  "Of course, I dare say you--you"--he tried to say
"love," but Scotch reserve balked stubbornly at the terrible
word--"you think you like Kilmeny now, but you are only a
lad--and lads' fancies change."

"Mine will not," Eric broke in vehemently.  "It is not a fancy,
Mr. Gordon.  It is the love that comes once in a lifetime and
once only.  I may be but a lad, but I know that Kilmeny is the
one woman in the world for me.  There can never be any other.
Oh, I'm not speaking rashly or inconsiderately.  I have weighed
the matter well and looked at it from every aspect.  And it all
comes to this--I love Kilmeny and I want what any decent man who
loves a woman truly has the right to have--the chance to win her
love in return."

"Well!" Thomas Gordon drew a long breath that was almost a sigh.
"Maybe--if you feel like that, Master--I don't know--there are
some things it isn't right to cross.  Perhaps we oughtn't--Janet,
woman, what shall we say to him?"

Janet Gordon had hitherto spoken no word.  She had sat rigidly
upright on one of the old chairs under Margaret Gordon's
insistent picture, with her knotted, toil-worn hands grasping the
carved arms tightly, and her eyes fastened on Eric's face.  At
first their expression had been guarded and hostile, but as the
conversation proceeded they lost this gradually and became almost
kindly.  Now, when her brother appealed to her, she leaned
forward and said eagerly,

"Do you know that there is a stain on Kilmeny's birth, Master?"

"I know that her mother was the innocent victim of a very sad
mistake, Miss Gordon.  I admit no real stain where there was no
conscious wrong doing.  Though, for that matter, even if there
were, it would be no fault of Kilmeny's and would make no
difference to me as far as she is concerned."

A sudden change swept over Janet Gordon's face, quite marvelous
in the transformation it wrought.  Her grim mouth softened and a
flood of repressed tenderness glorified her cold gray eyes.

"Well, then." she said almost triumphantly, "since neither that
nor her dumbness seems to be any drawback in your eyes I don't
see why you should not have the chance you want.  Perhaps your
world will say she is not good enough for you, but she is--she
is"--this half defiantly.  "She is a sweet and innocent and
true-hearted lassie.  She is bright and clever and she is not ill
looking.  Thomas, I say let the young man have his will."

Thomas Gordon stood up, as if he considered the responsibility
off his shoulders and the interview at an end.

"Very well, Janet, woman, since you think it is wise.  And may
God deal with him as he deals with her.  Good evening, Master.
I'll see you again, and you are free to come and go as suits you.
But I must go to my work now.  I left my horses standing in the
field."

"I will go up and send Kilmeny down," said Janet quietly.

She lighted the lamp on the table and left the room.  A few
minutes later Kilmeny came down.  Eric rose and went to meet her
eagerly, but she only put out her right hand with a pretty
dignity and, while she looked into his face, she did not look
into his eyes.

"You see I was right after all, Kilmeny," he said, smiling.  "Your
uncle and aunt haven't driven me away.  On the contrary they have
been very kind to me, and they say I may see you whenever and
wherever I like."

She smiled, and went over to the table to write on her slate.

"But they were very angry last night, and said dreadful things to
me.  I felt very frightened and unhappy.  They seemed to think I
had done something terribly wrong.  Uncle Thomas said he would
never trust me out of his sight again.  I could hardly believe it
when Aunt Janet came up and told me you were here and that I
might come down.  She looked at me very strangely as she spoke,
but I could see that all the anger had gone out of her face.  She
seemed pleased and yet sad.  But I am glad they have forgiven
us."

She did not tell him how glad she was, and how unhappy she had
been over the thought that she was never to see him again.
Yesterday she would have told him all frankly and fully; but for
her yesterday was a lifetime away--a lifetime in which she had
come into her heritage of womanly dignity and reserve.  The kiss
which Eric had left on her lips, the words her uncle and aunt had
said to her, the tears she had shed for the first time on a
sleepless pillow--all had conspired to reveal her to herself.
She did not yet dream that she loved Eric Marshall, or that he
loved her.  But she was no longer the child to be made a dear
comrade of.  She was, though quite unconsciously, the woman to be
wooed and won, exacting, with sweet, innate pride, her dues of
allegiance.



CHAPTER XIII. A SWEETER WOMAN NE'ER DREW BREATH

Thenceforward Eric Marshall was a constant visitor at the Gordon
homestead.  He soon became a favourite with Thomas and Janet,
especially the latter.  He liked them both, discovering under all
their outward peculiarities sterling worth and fitness of
character.  Thomas Gordon was surprisingly well read and could
floor Eric any time in argument, once he became sufficiently
warmed up to attain fluency of words.  Eric hardly recognized him
the first time he saw him thus animated.  His bent form
straightened, his sunken eyes flashed, his face flushed, his
voice rang like a trumpet, and he poured out a flood of eloquence
which swept Eric's smart, up-to-date arguments away like straws
in the rush of a mountain torrent.  Eric enjoyed his own defeat
enormously, but Thomas Gordon was ashamed of being thus drawn out
of himself, and for a week afterwards confined his remarks to
"Yes" and "No," or, at the outside, to a brief statement that a
change in the weather was brewing.

Janet never talked on matters of church and state; such she
plainly considered to be far beyond a woman's province.  But she
listened with lurking interest in her eyes while Thomas and Eric
pelted on each other with facts and statistics and opinions, and
on the rare occasions when Eric scored a point she permitted
herself a sly little smile at her brother's expense.

Of Neil, Eric saw but little.  The Italian boy avoided him, or if
they chanced to meet passed him by with sullen, downcast eyes.
Eric did not trouble himself greatly about Neil; but Thomas
Gordon, understanding the motive which had led Neil to betray his
discovery of the orchard trysts, bluntly told Kilmeny that she
must not make such an equal of Neil as she had done.

"You have been too kind to the lad, lassie, and he's got
presumptuous.  He must be taught his place.  I mistrust we have
all made more of him than we should."

But most of the idyllic hours of Eric's wooing were spent in the
old orchard; the garden end of it was now a wilderness of
roses--roses red as the heart of a sunset, roses pink as the
early flush of dawn, roses white as the snows on mountain peaks,
roses full blown, and roses in buds that were sweeter than
anything on earth except Kilmeny's face.  Their petals fell in
silken heaps along the old paths or clung to the lush grasses
among which Eric lay and dreamed, while Kilmeny played to him on
her violin.

Eric promised himself that when she was his wife her wonderful
gift for music should be cultivated to the utmost.  Her powers of
expression seemed to deepen and develop every day, growing as her
soul grew, taking on new colour and richness from her ripening
heart.

To Eric, the days were all pages in an inspired idyl.  He had
never dreamed that love could be so mighty or the world so
beautiful.  He wondered if the universe were big enough to hold
his joy or eternity long enough to live it out.  His whole
existence was, for the time being, bounded by that orchard where
he wooed his sweetheart.  All other ambitions and plans and hopes
were set aside in the pursuit of this one aim, the attainment of
which would enhance all others a thousand-fold, the loss of which
would rob all others of their reason for existence.  His own
world seemed very far away and the things of that world
forgotten.

His father, on hearing that he had taken the Lindsay school for a
year, had written him a testy, amazed letter, asking him if he
were demented.

"Or is there a girl in the case?" he wrote.  "There must be, to
tie you down to a place like Lindsay for a year.  Take care,
master Eric; you've been too sensible all your life.  A man is
bound to make a fool of himself at least once, and when you
didn't get through with that in your teens it may be attacking
you now."

David also wrote, expostulating more gravely; but he did not
express the suspicions Eric knew he must entertain.

"Good old David!  He is quaking with fear that I am up to
something he can't approve of, but he won't say a word by way of
attempting to force my confidence."

It could not long remain a secret in Lindsay that "the Master"
was going to the Gordon place on courting thoughts intent.  Mrs.
Williamson kept her own and Eric's counsel; the Gordons said
nothing; but the secret leaked out and great was the surprise and
gossip and wonder.  One or two incautious people ventured to
express their opinion of the Master's wisdom to the Master
himself; but they never repeated the experiment.  Curiosity was
rife.  A hundred stories were circulated about Kilmeny, all
greatly exaggerated in the circulation.  Wise heads were shaken
and the majority opined that it was a great pity.  The Master was
a likely young fellow; he could have his pick of almost anybody,
you might think; it was too bad that he should go and take up
with that queer, dumb niece of the Gordons who had been brought
up in such a heathenish way.  But then you never could guess what
way a man's fancy would jump when he set out to pick him a wife.
They guessed Neil Gordon didn't like it much.  He seemed to have
got dreadful moody and sulky of late and wouldn't sing in the
choir any more.  Thus the buzz of comment and gossip ran.

To those two in the old orchard it mattered not a whit.  Kilmeny
knew nothing of gossip.  To her, Lindsay was as much of an
unknown world as the city of Eric's home.  Her thoughts strayed
far and wide in the realm of her fancy, but they never wandered
out to the little realities that hedged her strange life around.
In that life she had blossomed out, a fair, unique thing.  There
were times when Eric almost regretted that one day he must take
her out of her white solitude to a world that, in the last
analysis, was only Lindsay on a larger scale, with just the same
pettiness of thought and feeling and opinion at the bottom of it.
He wished he might keep her to himself for ever, in that old,
spruce-hidden orchard where the roses fell.

One day he indulged himself in the fulfillment of the whim he had
formed when Kilmeny had told him she thought herself ugly.  He
went to Janet and asked her permission to bring a mirror to the
house that he might have the privilege of being the first to
reveal Kilmeny to herself exteriorly.  Janet was somewhat dubious
at first.

"There hasn't been such a thing in the house for sixteen years,
Master.  There never was but three--one in the spare room, and a
little one in the kitchen, and Margaret's own.  She broke them
all the day it first struck her that Kilmeny was going to be
bonny.  I might have got one after she died maybe.  But I didn't
think of it; and there's no need of lasses to be always prinking
at their looking glasses."

But Eric pleaded and argued skilfully, and finally Janet said,

"Well, well, have your own way.  You'd have it anyway I think,
lad.  You are one of those men who always get their own way.  But
that is different from the men who TAKE their own way--and that's
a mercy," she added under her breath.

Eric went to town the next Saturday and picked out a mirror that
pleased him.  He had it shipped to Radnor and Thomas Gordon
brought it home, not knowing what it was, for Janet had thought
it just as well he should not know.

"It's a present the Master is making Kilmeny," she told him.

She sent Kilmeny off to the orchard after tea, and Eric slipped
around to the house by way of the main road and lane.  He and
Janet together unpacked the mirror and hung it on the parlour
wall.

"I never saw such a big one, Master," said Janet rather
doubtfully, as if, after all, she distrusted its gleaming, pearly
depth and richly ornamented frame.  "I hope it won't make her
vain.  She is very bonny, but it may not do her any good to know
it."

"It won't harm her," said Eric confidently.  "When a belief in
her ugliness hasn't spoiled a girl a belief in her beauty won't."

But Janet did not understand epigrams.  She carefully removed a
little dust from the polished surface, and frowned meditatively
at the by no means beautiful reflection she saw therein.

"I cannot think what made Kilmeny suppose she was ugly, Master."

"Her mother told her she was," said Eric, rather bitterly.

"Ah!" Janet shot a quick glance at the picture of her sister.
"Was that it?  Margaret was a strange woman, Master.  I suppose
she thought her own beauty had been a snare to her.  She WAS
bonny.  That picture doesn't do her justice.  I never liked it.
It was taken before she was--before she met Ronald Fraser.  We
none of us thought it very like her at the time.  But, Master,
three years later it was like her--oh, it was like her then!
That very look came in her face."

"Kilmeny doesn't resemble her mother," remarked Eric, glancing at
the picture with the same feeling of mingled fascination and
distaste with which he always regarded it.  "Does she look like
her father?"

"No, not a great deal, though some of her ways are very like his.
She looks like her grandmother--Margaret's mother, Master.  Her
name was Kilmeny too, and she was a handsome, sweet woman.  I was
very fond of my stepmother, Master.  When she died she gave her
baby to me, and asked me to be a mother to it.  Ah well, I tried;
but I couldn't fence the sorrow out of Margaret's life, and it
sometimes comes to my mind that maybe I'll not be able to fence
it out of Kilmeny's either."

"That will be my task," said Eric.

"You'll do your best, I do not doubt.  But maybe it will be
through you that sorrow will come to her after all."

"Not through any fault of mine, Aunt Janet."

"No, no, I'm not saying it will be your fault.  But my heart
misgives me at times.  Oh, I dare say I am only a foolish old
woman, Master.  Go your ways and bring your lass here to look at
your plaything when you like.  I'll not make or meddle with it."

Janet betook herself to the kitchen and Eric went to look for
Kilmeny.  She was not in the orchard and it was not until he had
searched for some time that he found her.  She was standing under
a beech tree in a field beyond the orchard, leaning on the longer
fence, with her hands clasped against her cheek.  In them she
held a white Mary-lily from the orchard.  She did not run to meet
him while he was crossing the pasture, as she would once have
done.  She waited motionless until he was close to her.  Eric
began, half laughingly, half tenderly, to quote some lines from
her namesake ballad:

    "'Kilmeny, Kilmeny, where have you been?
    Long hae we sought baith holt and den,--
    By linn, by ford, and greenwood tree!
    Yet you are halesome and fair to see.
    Where got you that joup o' the lily sheen?
    That bonny snood o' the birk sae green,
    And those roses, the fairest that ever was seen?
    Kilmeny, Kilmeny, where have you been?'

"Only it's a lily and not a rose you are carrying.  I might go on
and quote the next couplet too--

    "'Kilmeny looked up with a lovely grace,
    But there was nae smile on Kilmeny's face.'

"Why are you looking so sober?"

Kilmeny did not have her slate with her and could not answer; but
Eric guessed from something in her eyes that she was bitterly
contrasting the beauty of the ballad's heroine with her own
supposed ugliness.

"Come down to the house, Kilmeny.  I have something there to show
you--something lovelier than you have ever seen before," he said,
with boyish pleasure shining in his eyes.  "I want you to go and
put on that muslin dress you wore last Sunday evening, and pin up
your hair the same way you did then.  Run along--don't wait for
me.  But you are not to go into the parlour until I come.  I want
to pick some of those Mary-lilies up in the orchard."

When Eric returned to the house with an armful of the long
stemmed, white Madonna lilies that bloomed in the orchard Kilmeny
was just coming down the steep, narrow staircase with its striped
carpeting of homespun drugget.  Her marvelous loveliness was
brought out into brilliant relief by the dark wood work and
shadows of the dim old hall.

She wore a trailing, clinging dress of some creamy tinted fabric
that had been her mother's.  It had not been altered in any
respect, for fashion held no sway at the Gordon homestead, and
Kilmeny thought that the dress left nothing to be desired.  Its
quaint style suited her admirably; the neck was slightly cut away
to show the round white throat, and the sleeves were long, full
"bishops," out of which her beautiful, slender hands slipped like
flowers from their sheaths.  She had crossed her long braids at
the back and pinned them about her head like a coronet; a late
white rose was fastened low down on the left side.

    "'A man had given all other bliss
    And all his worldly wealth for this--
    To waste his whole heart in one kiss
    Upon her perfect lips,'"

quoted Eric in a whisper as he watched her descend.  Aloud he
said,

"Take these lilies on your arm, letting their bloom fall against
your shoulder--so.  Now, give me your hand and shut your eyes.
Don't open them until I say you may."

He led her into the parlour and up to the mirror.

"Look," he cried, gaily.

Kilmeny opened her eyes and looked straight into the mirror
where, like a lovely picture in a golden frame, she saw herself
reflected.  For a moment she was bewildered.  Then she realized
what it meant.  The lilies fell from her arm to the floor and she
turned pale.  With a little low, involuntary cry she put her
hands over her face.

Eric pulled them boyishly away.

"Kilmeny, do you think you are ugly now?  This is a truer mirror
than Aunt Janet's silver sugar bowl!  Look--look--look!  Did you
ever imagine anything fairer than yourself, dainty Kilmeny?"

She was blushing now, and stealing shy radiant glances at the
mirror.  With a smile she took her slate and wrote naively,

"I think I am pleasant to look upon.  I cannot tell you how glad
I am.  It is so dreadful to believe one is ugly.  You can get
used to everything else, but you never get used to that.  It
hurts just the same every time you remember it.  But why did
mother tell me I was ugly?  Could she really have thought so?
Perhaps I have become better looking since I grew up."

"I think perhaps your mother had found that beauty is not always
a blessing, Kilmeny, and thought it wiser not to let you know you
possessed it.  Come, let us go back to the orchard now.  We
mustn't waste this rare evening in the house.  There is going to
be a sunset that we shall remember all our lives.  The mirror
will hang here.  It is yours.  Don't look into it too often,
though, or Aunt Janet will disapprove.  She is afraid it will
make you vain."

Kilmeny gave one of her rare, musical laughs, which Eric never
heard without a recurrence of the old wonder that she could laugh
so when she could not speak.  She blew an airy little kiss at her
mirrored face and turned from it, smiling happily.

On their way to the orchard they met Neil.  He went by them with
an averted face, but Kilmeny shivered and involuntarily drew
nearer to Eric.

"I don't understand Neil at all now," she wrote nervously.  "He
is not nice, as he used to be, and sometimes he will not answer
when I speak to him.  And he looks so strangely at me, too.
Besides, he is surly and impertinent to Uncle and Aunt."

"Don't mind Neil," said Eric lightly.  "He is probably sulky
because of some things I said to him when I found he had spied on
us."

That night before she went up stairs Kilmeny stole into the
parlour for another glimpse of herself in that wonderful mirror
by the light of a dim little candle she carried.  She was still
lingering there dreamily when Aunt Janet's grim face appeared in
the shadows of the doorway.

"Are you thinking about your own good looks, lassie?  Ay, but
remember that handsome is as handsome does," she said, with
grudging admiration--for the girl with her flushed cheeks and
shining eyes was something that even dour Janet Gordon could not
look upon unmoved.

Kilmeny smiled softly.

"I'll try to remember," she wrote, "but oh, Aunt Janet, I am so
glad I am not ugly.  It is not wrong to be glad of that, is it?"

The older woman's face softened.

"No, I don't suppose it is, lassie," she conceded.  "A comely
face is something to be thankful for--as none know better than
those who have never possessed it.  I remember well when I was a
girl--but that is neither here nor there.  The Master thinks you
are wonderful bonny, Kilmeny," she added, looking keenly at the
girl.

Kilmeny started and a scarlet blush scorched her face.  That, and
the expression that flashed into her eyes, told Janet Gordon all
she wished to know.  With a stifled sigh she bade her niece good
night and went away.

Kilmeny ran fleetly up the stairs to her dim little room, that
looked out into the spruces, and flung herself on her bed,
burying her burning face in the pillow.  Her aunt's words had
revealed to her the hidden secret of her heart.  She knew that
she loved Eric Marshall--and the knowledge brought with it a
strange anguish.  For was she not dumb?  All night she lay
staring wide-eyed through the darkness till the dawn.



CHAPTER XIV. IN HER SELFLESS MOOD

Eric noticed a change in Kilmeny at their next meeting--a change
that troubled him.  She seemed aloof, abstracted, almost ill at
ease.  When he proposed an excursion to the orchard he thought
she was reluctant to go.  The days that followed convinced him of
the change.  Something had come between them.  Kilmeny seemed as
far away from him as if she had in truth, like her namesake of
the ballad, sojourned for seven years in the land "where the rain
never fell and the wind never blew," and had come back washed
clean from all the affections of earth.

Eric had a bad week of it; but he determined to put an end to it
by plain speaking.  One evening in the orchard he told her of his
love.

It was an evening in August, with wheat fields ripening to their
harvestry--a soft violet night made for love, with the distant
murmur of an unquiet sea on a rocky shore sounding through it.
Kilmeny was sitting on the old bench where he had first seen her.
She had been playing for him, but her music did not please her
and she laid aside the violin with a little frown.

It might be that she was afraid to play--afraid that her new
emotions might escape her and reveal themselves in music.  It was
difficult to prevent this, so long had she been accustomed to
pour out all her feelings in harmony.  The necessity for
restraint irked her and made of her bow a clumsy thing which no
longer obeyed her wishes.  More than ever at that instant did she
long for speech--speech that would conceal and protect where
dangerous silence might betray.

In a low voice that trembled with earnestness Eric told her that
he loved her--that he had loved her from the first time he had
seen her in that old orchard.  He spoke humbly but not fearfully,
for he believed that she loved him, and he had little expectation
of any rebuff.

"Kilmeny, will you be my wife?" he asked finally, taking her
hands in his.

Kilmeny had listened with averted face.  At first she had blushed
painfully but now she had grown very pale.  When he had finished
speaking and was waiting for her answer, she suddenly pulled her
hands away, and, putting them over her face, burst into tears and
noiseless sobs.

"Kilmeny, dearest, have I alarmed you?  Surely you knew before
that I loved you.  Don't you care for me?"  Eric said, putting
his arm about her and trying to draw her to him.  But she shook
her head sorrowfully, and wrote with compressed lips,

"Yes, I do love you, but I will never marry you, because I cannot
speak."

"Oh, Kilmeny," said Eric smiling, for he believed his victory
won, "that doesn't make any difference to me--you know it
doesn't, sweetest.  If you love me that is enough."

But Kilmeny only shook her head again.  There was a very
determined look on her pale face.  She wrote,

"No, it is not enough.  It would be doing you a great wrong to
marry you when I cannot speak, and I will not do it because I
love you too much to do anything that would harm you.  Your world
would think you had done a very foolish thing and it would be
right.  I have thought it all over many times since something
Aunt Janet said made me understand, and I know I am doing right.
I am sorry I did not understand sooner, before you had learned to
care so much."

"Kilmeny, darling, you have taken a very absurd fancy into that
dear black head of yours.  Don't you know that you will make me
miserably unhappy all my life if you will not be my wife?"

"No, you think so now; and I know you will feel very badly for a
time.  Then you will go away and after awhile you will forget me;
and then you will see that I was right.  I shall be very unhappy,
too, but that is better than spoiling your life.  Do not plead or
coax because I shall not change my mind."

Eric did plead and coax, however--at first patiently and
smilingly, as one might argue with a dear foolish child; then
with vehement and distracted earnestness, as he began to realize
that Kilmeny meant what she said.  It was all in vain.  Kilmeny
grew paler and paler, and her eyes revealed how keenly she was
suffering.  She did not even try to argue with him, but only
listened patiently and sadly, and shook her head.  Say what he
would, entreat and implore as he might, he could not move her
resolution a hairs-breadth.

Yet he did not despair; he could not believe that she would
adhere to such a resolution; he felt sure that her love for him
would eventually conquer, and he went home not unhappily after
all.  He did not understand that it was the very intensity of her
love which gave her the strength to resist his pleading, where a
more shallow affection might have yielded.  It held her back
unflinchingly from doing him what she believed to be a wrong.



CHAPTER XV. AN OLD, UNHAPPY, FAR-OFF THING

The next day Eric sought Kilmeny again and renewed his pleadings,
but again in vain.  Nothing he could say, no argument which he
could advance, was of any avail against her sad determination.
When he was finally compelled to realize that her resolution was
not to be shaken, he went in his despair to Janet Gordon.  Janet
listened to his story with concern and disappointment plainly
visible on her face.  When he had finished she shook her head.

"I'm sorry, Master.  I can't tell you how sorry I am.  I had
hoped for something very different.  HOPED!  I have PRAYED for
it.  Thomas and I are getting old and it has weighed on my mind
for years--what was to become of Kilmeny when we would be gone.
Since you came I had hoped she would have a protector in you.
But if Kilmeny says she will not marry you I am afraid she'll
stick to it."

"But she loves me," cried the young man, "and if you and her
uncle speak to her--urge her--perhaps you can influence her--"

"No, Master, it wouldn't be any use.  Oh, we will, of course, but
it will not be any use.  Kilmeny is as determined as her mother
when once she makes up her mind.  She has always been good and
obedient for the most part, but once or twice we have found out
that there is no moving her if she does resolve upon anything.
When her mother died Thomas and I wanted to take her to church.
We could not prevail on her to go.  We did not know why then, but
now I suppose it was because she believed she was so very ugly.
It is because she thinks so much of you that she will not marry
you.  She is afraid you would come to repent having married a
dumb girl.  Maybe she is right--maybe she is right."

"I cannot give her up," said Eric stubbornly.  "Something must be
done.  Perhaps her defect can be remedied even yet.  Have you
ever thought of that?  You have never had her examined by a
doctor qualified to pronounce on her case, have you?"

"No, Master, we never took her to anyone.  When we first began to
fear that she was never going to talk Thomas wanted to take her
to Charlottetown and have her looked to.  He thought so much of
the child and he felt terrible about it.  But her mother wouldn't
hear of it being done.  There was no use trying to argue with
her.  She said that it would be no use--that it was her sin that
was visited on her child and it could never be taken away."

"And did you give in meekly to a morbid whim like that?" asked
Eric impatiently.

"Master, you didn't know my sister.  We HAD to give in--nobody
could hold out against her.  She was a strange woman--and a
terrible woman in many ways--after her trouble.  We were afraid
to cross her for fear she would go out of her mind."

"But, could you not have taken Kilmeny to a doctor unknown to her
mother?"

"No, that was not possible.  Margaret never let her out of her
sight, not even when she was grown up.  Besides, to tell you the
whole truth, Master, we didn't think ourselves that it would be
much use to try to cure Kilmeny.  It WAS a sin that made her as
she is."

"Aunt Janet, how can you talk such nonsense?  Where was there any
sin?  Your sister thought herself a lawful wife.  If Ronald
Fraser thought otherwise--and there is no proof that he did--HE
committed a sin, but you surely do not believe that it was
visited in this fashion on his innocent child!"

"No, I am not meaning that, Master.  That wasn't where Margaret
did wrong; and though I never liked Ronald Fraser over much, I
must say this in his defence--I believe he thought himself a free
man when he married Margaret.  No, it's something else--something
far worse.  It gives me a shiver whenever I think of it.  Oh,
Master, the Good Book is right when it says the sins of the
parents are visited on the children.  There isn't a truer word in
it than that from cover to cover."

"What, in heaven's name, is the meaning of all this?" exclaimed
Eric.  "Tell me what it is.  I must know the whole truth about
Kilmeny.  Do not torment me."

"I am going to tell you the story, Master, though it will be like
opening an old wound.  No living person knows it but Thomas and
me.  When you hear it you will understand why Kilmeny can't
speak, and why it isn't likely that there can ever be anything
done for her.  She doesn't know the truth and you must never tell
her.  It isn't a fit story for her ears, especially when it is
about her mother.  Promise me that you will never tell her, no
matter what may happen."

"I promise.  Go on--go on," said the young man feverishly.

Janet Gordon locked her hands together in her lap, like a woman
who nerves herself to some hateful task.  She looked very old;
the lines on her face seemed doubly deep and harsh.

"My sister Margaret was a very proud, high-spirited girl, Master.
But I would not have you think she was unlovable.  No, no, that
would be doing a great injustice to her memory.  She had her
faults as we all have; but she was bright and merry and
warm-hearted.  We all loved her.  She was the light and life of
this house.  Yes, Master, before the trouble that came on her
Margaret was a winsome lass, singing like a lark from morning
till night.  Maybe we spoiled her a little--maybe we gave her too
much of her own way.

"Well, Master, you have heard the story of her marriage to Ronald
Fraser and what came after, so I need not go into that.  I know,
or used to know Elizabeth Williamson well, and I know that
whatever she told you would be the truth and nothing more or less
than the truth.

"Our father was a very proud man.  Oh, Master, if Margaret was
too proud she got it from no stranger.  And her misfortune cut
him to the heart.  He never spoke a word to us here for more than
three days after he heard of it.  He sat in the corner there with
bowed head and would not touch bite or sup.  He had not been very
willing for her to marry Ronald Fraser; and when she came home in
disgrace she had not set foot over the threshold before he broke
out railing at her.  Oh, I can see her there at the door this
very minute, Master, pale and trembling, clinging to Thomas's
arm, her great eyes changing from sorrow and shame to wrath.  It
was just at sunset and a red ray came in at the window and fell
right across her breast like a stain of blood.

"Father called her a hard name, Master.  Oh, he was too hard--
even though he was my father I must say he was too hard on her,
broken-hearted as she was, and guilty of nothing more after all
than a little willfulness in the matter of her marriage.

"And father was sorry for it--Oh, Master, the word wasn't out of
his mouth before he was sorry for it.  But the mischief was done.
Oh, I'll never forget Margaret's face, Master!  It haunts me yet
in the black of the night.  It was full of anger and rebellion
and defiance.  But she never answered him back.  She clenched her
hands and went up to her old room without saying a word, all
those mad feelings surging in her soul, and being held back from
speech by her sheer, stubborn will.  And, Master, never a word
did Margaret say from that day until after Kilmeny was born--not
one word, Master.  Nothing we could do for her softened her.  And
we were kind to her, Master, and gentle with her, and never
reproached her by so much as a look.  But she would not speak to
anyone.  She just sat in her room most of the time and stared at
the wall with such awful eyes.  Father implored her to speak and
forgive him, but she never gave any sign that she heard him.

"I haven't come to the worst yet, Master.  Father sickened and
took to his bed.  Margaret would not go in to see him.  Then one
night Thomas and I were watching by him; it was about eleven
o'clock.  All at once he said,

"'Janet, go up and tell the lass'--he always called Margaret
that--it was a kind of pet name he had for her--'that I'm deein'
and ask her to come down and speak to me afore I'm gone.'

"Master, I went.  Margaret was sitting in her room all alone in
the cold and dark, staring at the wall.  I told her what our
father had said.  She never let on she heard me.  I pleaded and
wept, Master.  I did what I had never done to any human
creature--I kneeled to her and begged her, as she hoped for mercy
herself, to come down and see our dying father.  Master, she
wouldn't!  She never moved or looked at me.  I had to get up and
go downstairs and tell that old man she would not come."

Janet Gordon lifted her hands and struck them together in her
agony of remembrance.

"When I told father he only said, oh, so gently,

"'Poor lass, I was too hard on her.  She isna to blame.  But I
canna go to meet her mother till our little lass has forgie'n me
for the name I called her.  Thomas, help me up.  Since she winna
come to me I must e'en go to her.'

"There was no crossing him--we saw that.  He got up from his
deathbed and Thomas helped him out into the hall and up the
stair.  I walked behind with the candle.  Oh, Master, I'll never
forget it--the awful shadows and the storm wind wailing outside,
and father's gasping breath.  But we got him to Margaret's room
and he stood before her, trembling, with his white hairs falling
about his sunken face.  And he prayed Margaret to forgive him--
to forgive him and speak just one word to him before he went to
meet her mother.  Master"--Janet's voice rose almost to a
shriek--"she would not--she would not!  And yet she WANTED to
speak--afterwards she confessed to me that she wanted to speak.
But her stubbornness wouldn't let her.  It was like some evil
power that had gripped hold of her and wouldn't let go.  Father
might as well have pleaded with a graven image.  Oh, it was hard
and dreadful!  She saw her father die and she never spoke the
word he prayed for to him.  THAT was her sin, Master,--and for
that sin the curse fell on her unborn child.  When father
understood that she would not speak he closed his eyes and was
like to have fallen if Thomas had not caught him.

"'Oh, lass, you're a hard woman,' was all he said.  And they were
his last words.  Thomas and I carried him back to his room, but
the breath was gone from him before we ever got him there.

"Well, Master, Kilmeny was born a month afterwards, and when
Margaret felt her baby at her breast the evil thing that had held
her soul in its bondage lost its power.  She spoke and wept and
was herself again.  Oh, how she wept!  She implored us to forgive
her and we did freely and fully.  But the one against whom she
had sinned most grievously was gone, and no word of forgiveness
could come to her from the grave.  My poor sister never knew
peace of conscience again, Master.  But she was gentle and kind
and humble until--until she began to fear that Kilmeny was never
going to speak.  We thought then that she would go out of her
mind.  Indeed, Master, she never was quite right again.

"But that is the story and it's a thankful woman I am that the
telling of it is done.  Kilmeny can't speak because her mother
wouldn't."

Eric had listened with a gray horror on his face to the gruesome
tale.  The black tragedy of it appalled him--the tragedy of that
merciless law, the most cruel and mysterious thing in God's
universe, which ordains that the sin of the guilty shall be
visited on the innocent.  Fight against it as he would, the
miserable conviction stole into his heart that Kilmeny's case was
indeed beyond the reach of any human skill.

"It is a dreadful tale," he said moodily, getting up and walking
restlessly to and fro in the dim spruce-shadowed old kitchen
where they were.  "And if it is true that her mother's willful
silence caused Kilmeny's dumbness, I fear, as you say, that we
cannot help her.  But you may be mistaken.  It may have been
nothing more than a strange coincidence.  Possibly something may
be done for her.  At all events, we must try.  I have a friend in
Queenslea who is a physician.  His name is David Baker, and he is
a very skilful specialist in regard to the throat and voice.  I
shall have him come here and see Kilmeny."

"Have your way," assented Janet in the hopeless tone which she
might have used in giving him permission to attempt any
impossible thing.

"It will be necessary to tell Dr. Baker why Kilmeny cannot
speak--or why you think she cannot."

Janet's face twitched.

"Must that be, Master?  Oh, it's a bitter tale to tell a
stranger."

"Don't be afraid.  I shall tell him nothing that is not strictly
necessary to his proper understanding of the case.  It will be
quite enough to say that Kilmeny may be dumb because for several
months before her birth her mother's mind was in a very morbid
condition, and she preserved a stubborn and unbroken silence
because of a certain bitter personal resentment."

"Well, do as you think best, Master."

Janet plainly had no faith in the possibility of anything being
done for Kilmeny.  But a rosy glow of hope flashed over Kilmeny's
face when Eric told her what he meant to do.

"Oh, do you think he can make me speak?" she wrote eagerly.

"I don't know, Kilmeny.  I hope that he can, and I know he will
do all that mortal skill can do.  If he can remove your defect
will you promise to marry me, dearest?"

She nodded.  The grave little motion had the solemnity of a
sacred promise.

"Yes," she wrote, "when I can speak like other women I will marry
you."



CHAPTER XVI. DAVID BAKER'S OPINION

The next week David Baker came to Lindsay.  He arrived in the
afternoon when Eric was in school.  When the latter came home he
found that David had, in the space of an hour, captured Mrs.
Williamson's heart, wormed himself into the good graces of
Timothy, and become hail-fellow-well-met with old Robert.  But he
looked curiously at Eric when the two young men found themselves
alone in the upstairs room.

"Now, Eric, I want to know what all this is about.  What scrape
have you got into?  You write me a letter, entreating me in the
name of friendship to come to you at once.  Accordingly I come
post haste.  You seem to be in excellent health yourself.
Explain why you have inveigled me hither."

"I want you to do me a service which only you can do, David,"
said Eric quietly.  "I didn't care to go into the details by
letter.  I have met in Lindsay a young girl whom I have learned
to love.  I have asked her to marry me, but, although she cares
for me, she refuses to do so because she is dumb.  I wish you to
examine her and find out the cause of her defect, and if it can
be cured.  She can hear perfectly and all her other faculties are
entirely normal.  In order that you may better understand the
case I must tell you the main facts of her history."

This Eric proceeded to do.  David Baker listened with grave
attention, his eyes fastened on his friend's face.  He did not
betray the surprise and dismay he felt at learning that Eric had
fallen in love with a dumb girl of doubtful antecedents; and the
strange case enlisted his professional interest.  When he had
heard the whole story he thrust his hands into his pockets and
strode up and down the room several times in silence.  Finally he
halted before Eric.

"So you have done what I foreboded all along you would do--left
your common sense behind you when you went courting."

"If I did," said Eric quietly, "I took with me something better
and nobler than common sense."

David shrugged his shoulders.

"You'll have hard work to convince me of that, Eric."

"No, it will not be difficult at all.  I have one argument that
will convince you speedily--and that is Kilmeny Gordon herself.
But we will not discuss the matter of my wisdom or lack of it
just now.  What I want to know is this--what do you think of the
case as I have stated it to you?"

David frowned thoughtfully.

"I hardly know what to think.  It is very curious and unusual,
but it is not totally unprecedented.  There have been cases on
record where pre-natal influences have produced a like result.  I
cannot just now remember whether any were ever cured.  Well, I'll
see if anything can be done for this girl.  I cannot express any
further opinion until I have examined her."

The next morning Eric took David up to the Gordon homestead.  As
they approached the old orchard a strain of music came floating
through the resinous morning arcades of the spruce wood--a wild,
sorrowful, appealing cry, full of indescribable pathos, yet
marvelously sweet.

"What is that?" exclaimed David, starting.

"That is Kilmeny playing on her violin," answered Eric.  "She has
great talent in that respect and improvises wonderful melodies."

When they reached the orchard Kilmeny rose from the old bench to
meet them, her lovely luminous eyes distended, her face flushed
with the excitement of mingled hope and fear.

"Oh, ye gods!" muttered David helplessly.

He could not hide his amazement and Eric smiled to see it.  The
latter had not failed to perceive that his friend had until now
considered him as little better than a lunatic.

"Kilmeny, this is my friend, Dr. Baker," he said.

Kilmeny held out her hand with a smile.  Her beauty, as she stood
there in the fresh morning sunshine beside a clump of her sister
lilies, was something to take away a man's breath.  David, who
was by no means lacking in confidence and generally had a ready
tongue where women were concerned, found himself as mute and
awkward as a school boy, as he bowed over her hand.

But Kilmeny was charmingly at ease.  There was not a trace of
embarrassment in her manner, though there was a pretty shyness.
Eric smiled as he recalled HIS first meeting with her.  He
suddenly realized how far Kilmeny had come since then and how
much she had developed.

With a little gesture of invitation Kilmeny led the way through
the orchard to the wild cherry lane, and the two men followed.

"Eric, she is simply unutterable!" said David in an undertone.
"Last night, to tell you the truth, I had a rather poor opinion
of your sanity.  But now I am consumed with a fierce envy.  She
is the loveliest creature I ever saw."

Eric introduced David to the Gordons and then hurried away to his
school.  On his way down the Gordon lane he met Neil and was half
startled by the glare of hatred in the Italian boy's eyes.  Pity
succeeded the momentary alarm.  Neil's face had grown thin and
haggard; his eyes were sunken and feverishly bright; he looked
years older than on the day when Eric had first seen him in the
brook hollow.

Prompted by sudden compassionate impulse Eric stopped and held
out his hand.

"Neil, can't we be friends?" he said.  "I am sorry if I have been
the cause of inflicting pain on you."

"Friends!  Never!" said Neil passionately.  "You have taken
Kilmeny from me.  I shall hate you always.  And I'll be even with
you yet."

He strode fiercely up the lane, and Eric, with a shrug of his
shoulders, went on his way, dismissing the meeting from his mind.

The day seemed interminably long to him.  David had not returned
when he went home to dinner; but when he went to his room in the
evening he found his friend there, staring out of the window.

"Well," he said, impatiently, as David wheeled around but still
kept silence, "What have you to say to me?  Don't keep me in
suspense any longer, David.  I have endured all I can.  To-day
has seemed like a thousand years.  Have you discovered what is
the matter with Kilmeny?"

"There is nothing the matter with her," answered David slowly,
flinging himself into a chair by the window.

"What do you mean?"

"Just exactly what I say.  Her vocal organs are all perfect.  As
far as they are concerned, there is absolutely no reason why she
should not speak."

"Then why can't she speak?  Do you think--do you think--"

"I think that I cannot express my conclusion in any better words
than Janet Gordon used when she said that Kilmeny cannot speak
because her mother wouldn't.  That is all there is to it.  The
trouble is psychological, not physical.  Medical skill is
helpless before it.  There are greater men than I in my
profession; but it is my honest belief, Eric, that if you were to
consult them they would tell you just what I have told you,
neither more nor less."

"Then there is no hope," said Eric in a tone of despair.  "You
can do nothing for her?"

David took from the back of his chair a crochet antimacassar with
a lion rampant in the center and spread it over his knee.

"I can do nothing for her," he said, scowling at that work of
art.  "I do not believe any living man can do anything for her.
But I do not say--exactly--that there is no hope."

"Come, David, I am in no mood for guessing riddles.  Speak
plainly, man, and don't torment me."

David frowned dubiously and poked his finger through the hole
which represented the eye of the king of beasts.

"I don't know that I can make it plain to you.  It isn't very
plain to myself.  And it is only a vague theory of mine, of
course.  I cannot substantiate it by any facts.  In short, Eric,
I think it is possible that Kilmeny may speak sometime--if she
ever wants it badly enough."

"Wants to!  Why, man, she wants to as badly as it is possible for
any one to want anything.  She loves me with all her heart and
she won't marry me because she can't speak.  Don't you suppose
that a girl under such circumstances would 'want' to speak as
much as any one could?"

"Yes, but I do not mean that sort of wanting, no matter how
strong the wish may be.  What I do mean is--a sudden, vehement,
passionate inrush of desire, physical, psychical, mental, all in
one, mighty enough to rend asunder the invisible fetters that
hold her speech in bondage.  If any occasion should arise to
evoke such a desire I believe that Kilmeny would speak--and
having once spoken would thenceforth be normal in that
respect--ay, if she spoke but the one word."

"All this sounds like great nonsense to me," said Eric
restlessly.  "I suppose you have an idea what you are talking
about, but I haven't.  And, in any case, it practically means
that there is no hope for her--or me.  Even if your theory is
correct it is not likely such an occasion as you speak of will
ever arise.  And Kilmeny will never marry me."

"Don't give up so easily, old fellow.  There HAVE been cases on
record where women have changed their minds."

"Not women like Kilmeny," said Eric miserably.  "I tell you she
has all her mother's unfaltering will and tenacity of purpose,
although she is free from any taint of pride or selfishness.  I
thank you for your sympathy and interest, David.  You have done
all you could--but, heavens, what it would have meant to me if
you could have helped her!"

With a groan Eric flung himself on a chair and buried his face in
his hands.  It was a moment which held for him all the bitterness
of death.  He had thought that he was prepared for disappointment;
he had not known how strong his hope had really been until that
hope was utterly taken from him.

David, with a sigh, returned the crochet antimacassar carefully
to its place on the chair back.

"Eric, last night, to be honest, I thought that, if I found I
could not help this girl, it would be the best thing that could
happen, as far as you were concerned.  But since I have seen
her--well, I would give my right hand if I could do anything for
her.  She is the wife for you, if we could make her speak; yes,
and by the memory of your mother"--David brought his fist down on
the window sill with a force that shook the casement,--"she is
the wife for you, speech or no speech, if we could only convince
her of it."

"She cannot be convinced of that.  No, David, I have lost her.
Did you tell her what you have told me?"

"I told her I could not help her.  I did not say anything to her
of my theory--that would have done no good."

"How did she take it?"

"Very bravely and quietly--'like a winsome lady'.  But the look
in her eyes--Eric, I felt as if I had murdered something.  She
bade me good-bye with a pitiful smile and went upstairs.  I did
not see her again, although I stayed to dinner as her uncle's
request.  Those old Gordons are a queer pair.  I liked them,
though.  They are strong and staunch--good friends, bitter
enemies.  They were sorry that I could not help Kilmeny, but I
saw plainly that old Thomas Gordon thought that I had been
meddling with predestination in attempting it."

Eric smiled mechanically.

"I must go up and see Kilmeny.  You'll excuse me, won't you,
David?  My books are there--help yourself."

But when Eric reached the Gordon house he saw only old Janet, who
told him that Kilmeny was in her room and refused to see him.

"She thought you would come up, and she left this with me to give
you, Master."

Janet handed him a little note.  It was very brief and blotted
with tears.

"Do not come any more, Eric," it ran.  "I must not see you,
because it would only make it harder for us both.  You must go
away and forget me.  You will be thankful for this some day.  I
shall always love and pray for you."

                                                      "KILMENY."

"I MUST see her," said Eric desperately.  "Aunt Janet, be my
friend.  Tell her she must see me for a little while at least."

Janet shook her head but went upstairs.  She soon returned.

"She says she cannot come down.  You know she means it, Master,
and it is of no use to coax her.  And I must say I think she is
right.  Since she will not marry you it is better for her not to
see you."

Eric was compelled to go home with no better comfort than this.
In the morning, as it was Sunday, he drove David Baker to the
station.  He had not slept and he looked so miserable and
reckless that David felt anxious about him.  David would have
stayed in Lindsay for a few days, but a certain critical case in
Queenslea demanded his speedy return.  He shook hands with Eric
on the station platform.

"Eric, give up that school and come home at once.  You can do no
good in Lindsay now, and you'll only eat your heart out here."

"I must see Kilmeny once more before I leave," was all Eric's
answer.

That afternoon he went again to the Gordon homestead.  But the
result was the same; Kilmeny refused to see him, and Thomas
Gordon said gravely,

"Master, you know I like you and I am sorry Kilmeny thinks as she
does, though maybe she is right.  I would be glad to see you
often for your own sake and I'll miss you much; but as things are
I tell you plainly you'd better not come here any more.  It will
do no good, and the sooner you and she get over thinking about
each other the better for you both.  Go now, lad, and God bless
you."

"Do you know what it is you are asking of me?" said Eric
hoarsely.

"I know I am asking a hard thing for your own good, Master.  It
is not as if Kilmeny would ever change her mind.  We have had
some experience with a woman's will ere this.  Tush, Janet,
woman, don't be weeping.  You women are foolish creatures.  Do
you think tears can wash such things away?  No, they cannot blot
out sin, or the consequences of sin.  It's awful how one sin can
spread out and broaden, till it eats into innocent lives,
sometimes long after the sinner has gone to his own accounting.
Master, if you take my advice, you'll give up the Lindsay school
and go back to your own world as soon as may be."



CHAPTER XVII. A BROKEN FETTER

Eric went home with a white, haggard face.  He had never thought
it was possible for a man to suffer as he suffered then.  What was
he to do?  It seemed impossible to go on with life--there was NO
life apart from Kilmeny.  Anguish wrung his soul until his
strength went from him and youth and hope turned to gall and
bitterness in his heart.

He never afterwards could tell how he lived through the following
Sunday or how he taught school as usual on Monday.  He found out
how much a man may suffer and yet go on living and working.  His
body seemed to him an automaton that moved and spoke
mechanically, while his tortured spirit, pent-up within, endured
pain that left its impress on him for ever.  Out of that fiery
furnace of agony Eric Marshall was to go forth a man who had put
boyhood behind him for ever and looked out on life with eyes that
saw into it and beyond.

On Tuesday afternoon there was a funeral in the district and,
according to custom, the school was closed.  Eric went again to
the old orchard.  He had no expectation of seeing Kilmeny there,
for he thought she would avoid the spot lest she might meet him.
But he could not keep away from it, although the thought of it
was an added torment, and he vibrated between a wild wish that he
might never see it again, and a sick wonder how he could possibly
go away and leave it--that strange old orchard where he had met
and wooed his sweetheart, watching her develop and blossom under
his eyes, like some rare flower, until in the space of three
short months she had passed from exquisite childhood into still
more exquisite womanhood.

As he crossed the pasture field before the spruce wood he came
upon Neil Gordon, building a longer fence.  Neil did not look up
as Eric passed, but sullenly went on driving poles.  Before this
Eric had pitied Neil; now he was conscious of feeling sympathy
with him.  Had Neil suffered as he was suffering?  Eric had
entered into a new fellowship whereof the passport was pain.

The orchard was very silent and dreamy in the thick, deep tinted
sunshine of the September afternoon, a sunshine which seemed to
possess the power of extracting the very essence of all the
odours which summer has stored up in wood and field.  There were
few flowers now; most of the lilies, which had queened it so
bravely along the central path a few days before, were withered.
The grass had become ragged and sere and unkempt.  But in the
corners the torches of the goldenrod were kindling and a few
misty purple asters nodded here and there.  The orchard kept its
own strange attractiveness, as some women with youth long passed
still preserve an atmosphere of remembered beauty and innate,
indestructible charm.

Eric walked drearily and carelessly about it, and finally sat
down on a half fallen fence panel in the shadow of the
overhanging spruce boughs.  There he gave himself up to a
reverie, poignant and bitter sweet, in which he lived over again
everything that had passed in the orchard since his first meeting
there with Kilmeny.

So deep was his abstraction that he was conscious of nothing
around him.  He did not hear stealthy footsteps behind him in the
dim spruce wood.  He did not even see Kilmeny as she came slowly
around the curve of the wild cherry lane.

Kilmeny had sought the old orchard for the healing of her
heartbreak, if healing were possible for her.  She had no fear of
encountering Eric there at that time of day, for she did not know
that it was the district custom to close the school for a
funeral.  She would never have gone to it in the evening, but she
longed for it continually; it, and her memories, were all that
was left her now.

Years seemed to have passed over the girl in those few days.  She
had drunk of pain and broken bread with sorrow.  Her face was
pale and strained, with bluish, transparent shadows under her
large wistful eyes, out of which the dream and laughter of
girlhood had gone, but into which had come the potent charm of
grief and patience.  Thomas Gordon had shaken his head bodingly
when he had looked at her that morning at the breakfast table.

"She won't stand it," he thought.  "She isn't long for this
world.  Maybe it is all for the best, poor lass.  But I wish that
young Master had never set foot in the Connors orchard, or in
this house.  Margaret, Margaret, it's hard that your child should
have to be paying the reckoning of a sin that was sinned before
her birth."

Kilmeny walked through the lane slowly and absently like a woman
in a dream.  When she came to the gap in the fence where the lane
ran into the orchard she lifted her wan, drooping face and saw
Eric, sitting in the shadow of the wood at the other side of the
orchard with his bowed head in his hands.  She stopped quickly
and the blood rushed wildly over her face.

The next moment it ebbed, leaving her white as marble.  Horror
filled her eyes,--blank, deadly horror, as the livid shadow of a
cloud might fill two blue pools.

Behind Eric Neil Gordon was standing tense, crouched, murderous.
Even at that distance Kilmeny saw the look on his face, saw what
he held in his hand, and realized in one agonized flash of
comprehension what it meant.

All this photographed itself in her brain in an instant.  She
knew that by the time she could run across the orchard to warn
Eric by a touch it would be too late.  Yet she must warn him--she
MUST--she MUST!  A mighty surge of desire seemed to rise up
within her and overwhelm her like a wave of the sea,--a surge
that swept everything before it in an irresistible flood.  As
Neil Gordon swiftly and vindictively, with the face of a demon,
lifted the axe he held in his hand, Kilmeny sprang forward
through the gap.

"ERIC, ERIC, LOOK BEHIND YOU--LOOK BEHIND YOU!"

Eric started up, confused, bewildered, as the voice came
shrieking across the orchard.  He did not in the least realize
that it was Kilmeny who had called to him, but he instinctively
obeyed the command.

He wheeled around and saw Neil Gordon, who was looking, not at
him, but past him at Kilmeny.  The Italian boy's face was ashen
and his eyes were filled with terror and incredulity, as if he
had been checked in his murderous purpose by some supernatural
interposition.  The axe, lying at his feet where he had dropped
it in his unutterable consternation on hearing Kilmeny's cry told
the whole tale.  But before Eric could utter a word Neil turned,
with a cry more like that of an animal than a human being, and
fled like a hunted creature into the shadow of the spruce wood.

A moment later Kilmeny, her lovely face dewed with tears and
sunned over with smiles, flung herself on Eric's breast.

"Oh, Eric, I can speak,--I can speak!  Oh, it is so wonderful!
Eric, I love you--I love you!"



CHAPTER XVIII. NEIL GORDON SOLVES HIS OWN PROBLEM

"It is a miracle!" said Thomas Gordon in an awed tone.

It was the first time he had spoken since Eric and Kilmeny had
rushed in, hand in hand, like two children intoxicated with joy
and wonder, and gasped out their story together to him and Janet.

"Oh, no, it is very wonderful, but it is not a miracle," said
Eric.  "David told me it might happen.  I had no hope that it
would.  He could explain it all to you if he were here."

Thomas Gordon shook his head.  "I doubt if he could, Master--he,
or any one else.  It is near enough to a miracle for me.  Let us
thank God reverently and humbly that he has seen fit to remove
his curse from the innocent.  Your doctors may explain it as they
like, lad, but I'm thinking they won't get much nearer to it than
that.  It is awesome, that is what it is.  Janet, woman, I feel
as if I were in a dream. Can Kilmeny really speak?"

"Indeed I can, Uncle," said Kilmeny, with a rapturous glance at
Eric.  "Oh, I don't know how it came to me--I felt that I MUST
speak--and I did.  And it is so easy now--it seems to me as if I
could always have done it."

She spoke naturally and easily.  The only difficulty which she
seemed to experience was in the proper modulation of her voice.
Occasionally she pitched it too high--again, too low.  But it was
evident that she would soon acquire perfect control of it.  It
was a beautiful voice--very clear and soft and musical.

"Oh, I am so glad that the first word I said was your name,
dearest," she murmured to Eric.

"What about Neil?" asked Thomas Gordon gravely, rousing himself
with an effort from his abstraction of wonder.  "What are we to
do with him when he returns?  In one way this is a sad business."

Eric had almost forgotten about Neil in his overwhelming
amazement and joy.  The realization of his escape from sudden and
violent death had not yet had any opportunity to take possession
of his thoughts.

"We must forgive him, Mr. Gordon.  I know how I should feel
towards a man who took Kilmeny from me.  It was an evil impulse
to which he gave way in his suffering--and think of the good
which has resulted from it."

"That is true, Master, but it does not alter the terrible fact
that the boy had murder in his heart,--that he would have killed
you.  An over-ruling Providence has saved him from the actual
commission of the crime and brought good out of evil; but he is
guilty in thought and purpose.  And we have cared for him and
instructed him as our own--with all his faults we have loved him!
It is a hard thing, and I do not see what we are to do.  We
cannot act as if nothing had happened.  We can never trust him
again."

But Neil Gordon solved the problem himself.  When Eric returned
that night he found old Robert Williamson in the pantry regaling
himself with a lunch of bread and cheese after a trip to the
station.  Timothy sat on the dresser in black velvet state and
gravely addressed himself to the disposal of various tid-bits
that came his way.

"Good night, Master.  Glad to see you're looking more like
yourself.  I told the wife it was only a lover's quarrel most
like.  She's been worrying about you; but she didn't like to ask
you what was the trouble.  She ain't one of them unfortunate
folks who can't be happy athout they're everlasting poking their
noses into other people's business.  But what kind of a rumpus
was kicked up at the Gordon place, to-night, Master?"

Eric looked amazed.  What could Robert Williamson have heard so
soon?

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Why, us folks at the station knew there must have been a to-do
of some kind when Neil Gordon went off on the harvest excursion
the way he did."

"Neil gone!  On the harvest excursion!" exclaimed Eric.

"Yes, sir.  You know this was the night the excursion train left.
They cross on the boat to-night--special trip.  There was a dozen
or so fellows from hereabouts went.  We was all standing around
chatting when Lincoln Frame drove up full speed and Neil jumped
out of his rig.  Just bolted into the office, got his ticket and
out again, and on to the train without a word to any one, and as
black looking as the Old Scratch himself.  We was all too
surprised to speak till he was gone.  Lincoln couldn't give us
much information.  He said Neil had rushed up to their place
about dark, looking as if the constable was after him, and
offered to sell that black filly of his to Lincoln for sixty
dollars if Lincoln would drive him to the station in time to
catch the excursion train.  The filly was Neil's own, and Lincoln
had been wanting to buy her but Neil would never hear to it
afore.  Lincoln jumped at the chance.  Neil had brought the filly
with him, and Lincoln hitched right up and took him to the
station.  Neil hadn't no luggage of any kind and wouldn't open
his mouth the whole way up, Lincoln says.  We concluded him and
old Thomas must have had a row.  D'ye know anything about it?  Or
was you so wrapped up in sweethearting that you didn't hear or
see nothing else?"

Eric reflected rapidly.  He was greatly relieved to find that
Neil had gone.  He would never return and this was best for all
concerned.  Old Robert must be told a part of the truth at least,
since it would soon become known that Kilmeny could speak.

"There was some trouble at the Gordon place to-night, Mr.
Williamson," he said quietly.  "Neil Gordon behaved rather badly
and frightened Kilmeny terribly,--so terribly that a very
surprising thing has happened.  She has found herself able to
speak, and can speak perfectly."

Old Robert laid down the piece of cheese he was conveying to his
mouth on the point of a knife and stared at Eric in blank
amazement.

"God bless my soul, Master, what an extraordinary thing!" he
ejaculated.  "Are you in earnest?  Or are you trying to see how
much of a fool you can make of the old man?"

"No, Mr. Williamson, I assure you it is no more than the simple
truth. Dr. Baker told me that a shock might cure her,--and it
has.  As for Neil, he has gone, no doubt for good, and I think it
well that he has."

Not caring to discuss the matter further, Eric left the kitchen.
But as he mounted the stairs to his room he heard old Robert
muttering, like a man in hopeless bewilderment,

"Well, I never heard anything like this in all my born
days--never--never.  Timothy, did YOU ever hear the like?  Them
Gordons are an unaccountable lot and no mistake.  They couldn't
act like other people if they tried.  I must wake mother up and
tell her about this, or I'll never be able to sleep."



CHAPTER XIX. VICTOR FROM VANQUISHED ISSUES

Now that everything was settled Eric wished to give up teaching
and go back to his own place.  True, he had "signed papers" to
teach the school for a year; but he knew that the trustees would
let him off if he procured a suitable substitute.  He resolved to
teach until the fall vacation, which came in October, and then
go.  Kilmeny had promised that their marriage should take place
in the following spring.  Eric had pleaded for an earlier date,
but Kilmeny was sweetly resolute, and Thomas and Janet agreed
with her.

"There are so many things that I must learn yet before I shall be
ready to be married," Kilmeny had said.  "And I want to get
accustomed to seeing people.  I feel a little frightened yet
whenever I see any one I don't know, although I don't think I
show it.  I am going to church with Uncle and Aunt after this,
and to the Missionary Society meetings.  And Uncle Thomas says
that he will send me to a boarding school in town this winter if
you think it advisable."

Eric vetoed this promptly.  The idea of Kilmeny in a boarding
school was something that could not be thought about without
laughter.

"I can't see why she can't learn all she needs to learn after she
is married to me, just as well as before," he grumbled to her
uncle and aunt.

"But we want to keep her with us for another winter yet,"
explained Thomas Gordon patiently.  "We are going to miss her
terrible when she does go, Master.  She has never been away from
us for a day--she is all the brightness there is in our lives.
It is very kind of you to say that she can come home whenever she
likes, but there will be a great difference.  She will belong to
your world and not to ours.  That is for the best--and we
wouldn't have it otherwise.  But let us keep her as our own for
this one winter yet."

Eric yielded with the best grace he could muster.  After all, he
reflected, Lindsay was not so far from Queenslea, and there were
such things as boats and trains.

"Have you told your father about all this yet?" asked Janet
anxiously.

No, he had not.  But he went home and wrote a full account of his
summer to old Mr. Marshall that night.

Mr. Marshall, Senior, answered the letter in person.  A few days
later, Eric, coming home from school, found his father sitting in
Mrs. Williamson's prim, fleckless parlour.  Nothing was said
about Eric's letter, however, until after tea.  When they found
themselves alone, Mr. Marshall said abruptly,

"Eric, what about this girl?  I hope you haven't gone and made a
fool of yourself.  It sounds remarkably like it.  A girl that has
been dumb all her life--a girl with no right to her father's
name--a country girl brought up in a place like Lindsay!  Your
wife will have to fill your mother's place,--and your mother was
a pearl among women.  Do you think this girl is worthy of it?  It
isn't possible!  You've been led away by a pretty face and dairy
maid freshness.  I expected some trouble out of this freak of
yours coming over here to teach school."

"Wait until you see Kilmeny, father," said Eric, smiling.

"Humph!  That's just exactly what David Baker said.  I went
straight to him when I got your letter, for I knew that there was
some connection between it and that mysterious visit of his over
here, concerning which I never could drag a word out of him by
hook or crook.  And all HE said was, 'Wait until you see Kilmeny
Gordon, sir.'  Well, I WILL wait till I see her, but I shall look
at her with the eyes of sixty-five, mind you, not the eyes of
twenty-four.  And if she isn't what your wife ought to be, sir,
you give her up or paddle your own canoe.  I shall not aid or
abet you in making a fool of yourself and spoiling your life."

Eric bit his lip, but only said quietly,

"Come with me, father.  We will go to see her now."

They went around by way of the main road and the Gordon lane.
Kilmeny was not in when they reached the house.

"She is up in the old orchard, Master," said Janet.  "She loves
that place so much she spends all her spare time there.  She
likes to go there to study."

They sat down and talked awhile with Thomas and Janet.  When they
left, Mr. Marshall said,

"I like those people.  If Thomas Gordon had been a man like
Robert Williamson I shouldn't have waited to see your Kilmeny.
But they are all right--rugged and grim, but of good stock and
pith--native refinement and strong character.  But I must say
candidly that I hope your young lady hasn't got her aunt's
mouth."

"Kilmeny's mouth is like a love-song made incarnate in sweet
flesh," said Eric enthusiastically.

"Humph!" said Mr. Marshall.  "Well," he added more tolerantly, a
moment later, "I was a poet, too, for six months in my life when
I was courting your mother."

Kilmeny was reading on the bench under the lilac trees when they
reached the orchard.  She stood up and came shyly forward to meet
them, guessing who the tall, white-haired old gentleman with Eric
must be.  As she approached Eric saw with a thrill of exultation
that she had never looked lovelier.  She wore a dress of her
favourite blue, simply and quaintly made, as all her gowns were,
revealing the perfect lines of her lithe, slender figure.  Her
glossy black hair was wound about her head in a braided coronet,
against which a spray of wild asters shone like pale purple
stars.  Her face was flushed delicately with excitement.  She
looked like a young princess, crowned with a ruddy splash of
sunlight that fell through the old trees.

"Father, this is Kilmeny," said Eric proudly.

Kilmeny held out her hand with a shyly murmured greeting.  Mr.
Marshall took it and held it in his, looking so steadily and
piercingly into her face that even her frank gaze wavered before
the intensity of his keen old eyes.  Then he drew her to him and
kissed her gravely and gently on her white forehead.

"My dear," he said, "I am glad and proud that you have consented
to be my son's wife--and my very dear and honoured daughter."

Eric turned abruptly away to hide his emotion and on his face was
a light as of one who sees a great glory widening and deepening
down the vista of his future.

THE END.


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