The Dark Star

Her mother rose after a few moments, laid aside the pile of drawings,

went to the kitchen and returned with her daughter's schoolbooks and

lunch basket.

"Rue, you'll be late again. Get on your rubbers immediately."

The child's shabby winter coat was already too short in skirt and

sleeve, and could be lengthened no further. She pulled the blue

toboggan cap over her head, took a hasty osculatory leave of her

father, seized books and lunch basket, and followed her mother to the

door.

Below the house the Brookhollow road ran south across an old stone

bridge and around a hill to Gayfield, half a mile away.

Rue, drawing on her woollen gloves, looked up at her mother. Her lip

trembled very slightly. She said: "I shouldn't know what to do if I couldn't draw pictures.... When I

draw a princess I mean her for myself.... It is pleasant--to pretend

to live with swans."

She opened the door, paused on the step; the frosty breath drifted

from her lips. Then she looked back over her shoulder; her mother

kissed her, held her tightly for a moment.

"If I'm to be forbidden to draw pictures," repeated the girl, "I don't

know what will become of me. Because I really live there--in the

pictures I make."

"We'll talk it over this evening, darling. Don't draw in study hour

any more, will you?"

"I'll try to remember, mother."

* * * * *

When the spindle-limbed, boyish figure had sped away beyond sight,

Mrs. Carew shut the door, drew her wool shawl closer, and returned

slowly to the sitting-room. Her husband, deep in a padded

rocking-chair by the window, was already absorbed in the volume which

lay open on his knees--the life of the Reverend Adoniram Judson--one

of the world's good men. Ruhannah had named her cat after him.

His wife seated herself. She had dishes to do, two bedrooms,

preparations for noonday dinner--the usual and unchangeable routine.

She turned and looked out of the window across brown fields thinly

powdered with snow. Along a brawling, wintry-dark stream, fringed with

grey alders, ran the Brookhollow road. Clumps of pines and elms

bordered it. There was nothing else to see except a distant crow in a

ten-acre lot, walking solemnly about all by himself.

... Like the vultures that wandered through the compound that dreadful

day in May ... she thought involuntarily.

But it was a far cry from Trebizond to Brookhollow. And her husband

had been obliged to give up after the last massacre, when every

convert had been dragged out and killed in the floating shadow of the

Stars and Stripes, languidly brilliant overhead.