After this came days of pouring rain. The lawns and the playing-fields were sodden, the roads were deep in sticky mud, the row of bare elms dripped dismally on to the garden seats below, and the neglected sundial no longer told the hour of day, nor formed a centre for the throng of girls who generally haunted its steps.
"Baldur the Sun God is dead!" said Aldred, looking out of the window one damp afternoon at the cheerless prospect, and recalling Miss Drummond's lesson on Northern Mythology. "Loki has killed him with the piece of mistletoe, and he will never return to Asgard. All the Æsir are weeping for him, and the earth will be given up now to the frost giants and the spirits of the winds."
"Won't he ever come back?" said Mabel, falling in with her friend's humour.
"Just for a little while; but he always has to go in the winter, like Proserpine, who was bound to spend half the year with Pluto in Hades. I suppose there's no country, except the lost Atlantis, where it keeps summer all the year round."
"Why, you sound quite melancholy!"
"So I am."
"But why?"
"I don't know, except that it is so sad to see the summer gone."
Aldred could scarcely explain her attitude of mind, though she was conscious that the change in the world without affected her strongly. She had an extreme love of nature, an intense appreciation of beautiful things. No ancient Greek ever joyed in the sunshine more than she, or took greater pleasure in the scent of the flowers, or the blue of the sea and sky, or the song of the birds in springtime. Her artistic, poetical temperament was highly sensitive to all outward impressions; she was so keenly alive to the great, dramatic human tragedy and comedy that is being enacted around us, so in touch with the wonder and mystery of life, that what would pass unnoticed by many was to her the very essence of being.
Few people had ever sympathized with this side of her disposition. Her father had not realized it, Keith could not understand it, and Aunt Bertha had repressed it sternly. Modern schoolgirls are certainly not sentimental; they are more prone to laugh at poetic fancies than to admire them: and Aldred knew that on this score she would probably meet with ridicule from her form-mates. In consequence, she confined herself in public to the practical and prosaic, and, with the exception of an occasional private confidence to Mabel, kept her reflections locked in her own bosom.