The Dark Star

Under a lilac the ground seemed moister and more promising for

vermicular investigation; she drew on her gloves, dug a few holes with

the trowel, extracted an angleworm, frowned slightly, holding it

between gloved fingers, regarding its contortions with pity and

aversion.

To bait a hook was not agreeable to the girl; she managed to do it,

however, then shouldering her pole she walked across the road and down

to the left, through rank grasses and patches of milkweed, bergamot,

and queen's lace, scattering a cloud of brown and silver-spotted

butterflies.

Alder, elder, and Indian willow barred her way; rank thickets of

jewelweed hung vivid blossoming drops across her path; woodbine and

clematis trailed dainty snares to catch her in their fairy nets; a

rabbit scurried out from behind the ruined paper mill as she came to

the swift, shallow water below the dam.

Into this she presently plumped her line, and the next instant jerked

it out again with a wriggling, silvery minnow flashing on the hook.

Carrying her pole with its tiny, glittering victim dangling aloft, Rue

hastily retraced her steps to the road, crossed the bridge to the

further end, seated herself on the limestone parapet, and, swinging

her pole with both hands, cast line and hook and minnow far out into

the pond. It was a business she did not care for--this extinguishing

of the life-spark in anything. But, like her mill work, it appeared to

be a necessary business, and, so regarding it, she went about it.

The pond above the half-ruined dam lay very still; her captive minnow

swam about with apparently no discomfort, trailing on the surface of

the pond above him the cork which buoyed the hook.

Rue, her pole clasped in both hands between her knees, gazed with

preoccupied eyes out across the water. On the sandy shore, a pair of

speckled tip-ups ran busily about, dipping and bobbing, or spread

their white, striped wings to sheer the still surface of the pond,

swing shoreward with bowed wings again, and resume their formal,

quaint, and busy manners.

From the interstices of the limestone parapet grew a white

bluebell--the only one Rue had ever seen. As long as she could

remember it had come up there every year and bloomed, snow-white amid

a world of its blue comrades in the grass below. She looked for it

now, saw it in bud--three sturdy stalks sprouting at right angles

from the wall and curving up parallel to it. Somehow or other she had

come to associate this white freak of nature with herself--she

scarcely knew why. It comforted her, oddly, to see it again, still

surviving, still delicately vigorous, though where among those stone

slabs it found its nourishment she never could imagine.