Part 16 (1/2)

Gordon broke into a laugh.

”Oh, he was a special envoy to England after he was wounded.”

The announcement had a distinct effect upon Mrs. Yorke, who instantly became much more cordial to Gordon. She took a closer look at him than she had given herself the trouble to take before, and discovered, under the sunburn and worn clothes, something more than she had formerly observed. The young man's expression had changed. A reference to his father always sobered him and kindled a light in his eyes. It was the first time Mrs. Yorke had taken in what her daughter meant by calling him handsome.

”Why, he is quite distinguished-looking!” she thought to herself. And she reflected what a pity it was that so good-looking a young man should have been planted down there in that out-of-the-way pocket of the world, and thus lost to society. She did not know that the kindling eyes opposite her were burning with a resolve that not only Mrs. Yorke, but the world, should know him, and that she should recognize his superiority.

CHAPTER VIII

MR. KEITH'S IDEALS

After this it was astonis.h.i.+ng how many excuses Gordon could find for visiting the village. He was always wanting to consult a book in the Doctor's library, or get something, which, indeed, meant that he wanted to get a glimpse of a young girl with violet eyes and pink cheeks, stretched out in a lounging-chair, picturesquely reclining amid clouds of white pillows. Nearly always he carried with him a bunch of flowers from Mrs. Rawson's garden, which were to make patches of pink or red or yellow among Miss Alice's pillows, and bring a fresh light into her eyes. And sometimes he took a basket of cherries or strawberries for Mrs. Yorke. His friends, the Doctor and the Rawsons, began to rally him on his new interest in the Springs.

”I see you are takin' a few nubbins for the old cow,” said Squire Rawson, one afternoon as Gordon started off, at which Gordon blushed as red as the cherries he was carrying. It was just what he had been doing.

”Well, that is the way to ketch the calf,” said the old farmer, jovially; ”but I 'low the mammy is used to pretty high feedin'.” He had seen Mrs. Yorke driving along in much richer attire than usually dazzled the eyes of the Ridge neighborhood, and had gauged her with a shrewd eye.

Miss Alice Yorke's sprain turned out to be less serious than had been expected. She herself had proved a much less refractory patient than her mother had ever known her.

It does not take two young people of opposite s.e.xes long to overcome the formalities which convention has fixed among their seniors, especially when one of them has brought the other down a mountain-side in his arms.

Often, in a sheltered corner of the long verandah, Keith read to Alice on balmy afternoons, or in the moonlit evenings sauntered with her through the fields of their limited experience, and quoted s.n.a.t.c.hes from his chosen favorites, poems that lived in his heart, and fancied her the ”maid of the downward look and sidelong glance.”

Thus, by the time Alice Yorke was able to move about again, she and Keith had already reached a footing where they had told each other a good deal of their past, and were finding the present very pleasant, and one of them, at least, was beginning, when he turned his eyes to the future, to catch the glimmer of a very rosy light.

It showed in his appearance, in his face, where a new expression of a more definite ambition and a higher resolution was beginning to take its place.

Dr. Balsam noted it, and when he met Gordon he began to have a quizzical light in his deep-gray eyes. He had, too, a tender tone in his voice when he addressed the girl. Perhaps, a vision came to him at times of another country lad, well-born like this one, and, like this one, poor, wandering on the New England hills with another young girl, primmer, perhaps, and less sophisticated than this little maiden, who had come from the westward to spend a brief holiday on the banks of the Piscataqua, and had come into his life never to depart--of his dreams and his hopes; of his struggles to achieve the education which would make him worthy of her; and then of the overthrow of all: of darkness and exile and wanderings.

When the Doctor sat on his porch of an evening, with his pipe, looking out over the sloping hills, sometimes his face grew almost melancholy.

Had he not been intended for other things than this exile? Abigail Brooke had never married, he knew. What might have happened had he gone back? And when he next saw Alice Yorke there would be a softer tone in his voice, and he would talk a deeper and higher philosophy to her than she had ever heard, belittling the gaudy rewards of life, and instilling in her mind ideas of something loftier and better and finer than they.

He even told her once something of the story of his life, and of the suffering and sorrow that had been visited upon the victims of a foolish pride and a selfish ambition. Though he did not confide to her that it was of himself he spoke, the girl's instinct instantly told her that it was his own experience that he related, and her interest was deeply excited.

”Did she ever marry, Doctor?” she asked eagerly. ”Oh, I hope she did not. I might forgive her if she did not; but if she married I would never forgive her!”

The Doctor's eyes, as they rested on her eager face, had a kindly expression in them, and a look of amus.e.m.e.nt lurked there also.

”No; she never married,” he said. ”Nor did he.”

”Oh, I am glad of that,” she exclaimed; and then more softly added, ”I know he did not.”

Dr. Balsam gazed at her calmly. He did not pursue the subject further.

He thought he had told his story in such a way as to convey the moral without disclosing that he spoke of himself. Yet she had discovered it instantly. He wondered if she had seen also the moral he intended to convey.

Alice Yorke was able to walk now, and many an afternoon Gordon Keith invited her to stroll with him on the mountain-side or up the Ridge, drawing her farther and farther as her strength returned.

The Spring is a dangerous season for a young man and a pretty girl to be thrown closely together for the first time, and the budding woods are a perilous pasture for their browsing thoughts. It was not without some insight that the ancient poets pictured dryads as inhabitants of the woods, and made the tinkling springs and rippling streams the abiding-places of their nymphs.