The Choir Invisible

"What a woman!" he said to himself, strangely troubled a moment later when

she was gone. He had not looked at the book again. It lay forgotten by his

pillow.

"What a woman!" he repeated, with a sigh that was like a groan.

Her bringing of the book--her unusual conversation--her excitement--her

seriousness--the impression she made upon him that a new problem was

beginning to work itself out in her life--most of all that one startling

revelation of herself at the instant of turning away: all these occupied his

thoughts that day.

She did not return the next or the next or the next. And, it was during

these long vacant hours that he began to weave curiously together all that

he had ever heard of her and of her past; until, in the end, he accomplished

something like a true restoration of her life--in the colour of his own

emotions. Then he fell to wandering up and down this long vista of scenes as

he might have sought unwearied secret gallery of pictures through which he

alone had the privilege of walking.

At the far end of the vista he could behold her in her childhood as the

daughter of a cavalier land-holder in the valley of the James: an heiress of

a vast estate with its winding creeks and sunny bays, its tobacco

plantations worked by troops of slaves, its deer parks and open country for

the riding to hounds. There was the manor-house in the style of the grand

places of the English gentry from whom her father was descended; sloping

from the veranda to the river landing a wide lawn covered with the silvery

grass of the English parks, its walks bordered with hedges of box, its

summer-house festooned with vines, its terraces gay with the old familiar

shrubs and flowers loyally brought over from the mother land. He could see

her as, some bright summer morning, followed by a tame fawn, she bounded

down the lawn to the private landing where a slow frigate had stopped to

break bulk on its way to Williamsburg-perhaps to put out with other

furniture a little mahogany chair brought especially for herself over the

rocking sea from London or where some round-sterned packet from New England

or New Amsterdam was unloading its cargo of grain or hides or rum in

exchange for her father's tobacco. Perhaps to greet her father himself

returning from a long absence amid old scenes that still could draw him back

to England; or standing lonely on the pier, to watch in tears him and her

brothers--a vanishing group--as they waved her a last good-bye and drifted

slowly out to the blue ocean on their way "home" to school at Eton.