The Dark Star

She caught a glimpse of him--his sturdy frame, white hair, and ruddy

visage--and a swift, almost wistful memory of young Jim Neeland passed

through her mind.

But it was a very confused mind--only the bewildered mind of a very

young girl--and the memory of the boy flashed into its confusion and

out again as rapidly as the landscape sped away behind the flying

car.

Dully she was aware that she was leaving familiar and beloved things,

but could not seem to realise it--childhood, girlhood, father and

mother, Brookhollow, the mill, Gayfield, her friends, all were

vanishing in the flying dust behind her, dwindling, dissolving into an

infinitely growing distance.

They took the gradual slope of a mile-long hill as swallows take the

air; houses, barns, woods, orchards, grain fields, flew by on either

side; other cars approaching passed them like cannon balls; the

sunlit, undulating world flowed glittering away behind; only the

stainless blue ahead confronted them immovably--a vast, magnificent

goal, vague with the mystery of promise.

"On this trip," said Brandes, "we may only have time to see the Loove

and the palaces and all like that. Next year we'll fix it so we can

stay in Paris and you can study art."

Ruhannah's lips formed the words, "Thank you."

"Can't you learn to call me Eddie?" he urged.

The girl was silent.

"You're everything in the world to me, Rue."

The same little mechanical smile fixed itself on her lips, and she

looked straight ahead of her.

"Haven't you begun to love me just a little bit, Rue?"

"I like you. You are very kind to us."

"Don't your affection seem to grow a little stronger now?" he urged.

"You are so kind to us," she repeated gratefully; "I like you for

it."

The utterly unawakened youth of her had always alternately fascinated

and troubled him. Gambler that he was, he had once understood that

patience is a gambler's only stock in trade. But now for the first

time in his career he found himself without it.

"You said," he insisted, "that you'd love me when we were married."

She turned her child's eyes on him in faint surprise: "A wife loves her husband always, doesn't she?"

"Do you?"

"I suppose I shall.... I haven't been married very long--long enough

to feel as though I am really married. When I begin to realise it I

shall understand, of course, that I love you."

It was the calm and immature reply of a little girl playing house. He

knew it. He looked at her pure, perplexed profile of a child and knew

that what he had said was futile--understood that it was meaningless

to her, that it was only confusing a mind already dazed--a mind of

which too much had been expected, too much demanded.