“It drizzles like anything, and the tool-house door is open, and, oh, aunty! the path shines quite down to the gate.”
“It generally shines in the rain, dear.”
“Oh!” said Gracia, thoughtfully. She seemed to be examining a sudden idea, and began the pretence of a whistle which afterward became a true fact.
“I wish it wouldn't be generally, don't you? I wish things would all be specially.”
“I wouldn't wi—I wouldn't whistle, if I were you,” said Miss Elizabeth, gently.
“Oh!” Gracia came suddenly with a ripple and coo of laughter, and dropped on her knees by Miss Elizabeth. “You couldn't, you poor aunty, if you tried. You never learned, did you?”
Miss Elizabeth hesitated.
“I once tried to learn—of your father. I used to think it sounded cheerful. But my mother would n't allow it. What I really started to say was, that I wouldn't, if I were you, I wouldn't wish so many things to be other than they are. I used to wish for things to be different, and then, you know, when they stay quite the same, it's such a number of troubles.”
Gracia clasped her fingers about one knee, studied the neatly built fire and the blue and white tiles over it, and thought hard on the subject of wishes. She thought that she had not wished things to be different, so much as to remain the same as of old, when one wore yellow braids, and could whistle with approval, and everything happened specially. Because it is sad when you begin to suspect that the sun and moon and the growths of spring do not care about you, but only act according to habits they have fallen into, and that the shining paths, which seem to lead from beyond the night, are common or accidental and not meant specially. The elder romancers and the latest seers do insist together that they are, that such highways indeed as the moon lays on the water are translunary and come with purposes from a celestial city. The romancers have a simple faith, and the seers an ingenious theory about it. But the days and weeks argue differently. They had begun to trouble the fealty that Gracia held of romance, and she had not met with the theory of the seers.
Sandy Cass went through experiences that night which cannot be written, for there was no sequence in them, and they were translunary and sub-earthly; some of them broken fragments of his life thrown up at him out of a kind of smoky red pit, very much as it used to be in the field hospital. His life seemed to fall easily into fragments. There had not been much sequence in it, since he began running away from the house of the squire at fifteen. It had ranged between the back and front doors of the social structure these ten years. The squire used to storm, because it came natural to him to speak violently; but privately he thought Sandy no more than his own younger self, let loose instead of tied down. He even envied Sandy. He wished he would come oftener to entertain him. Sandy was a periodical novel continued in the next issue, an irregular and barbarous Odyssey, in which the squire, comparing with his Pope's translation, recognized Scylla and Charybdis, Cyclops and Circe, and the interference of the quarrelling gods. But that night the story went through the Land of Shadows and Red Dreams. Sandy came at last to the further edge of the Land; beyond was the Desert of Dreamless Sleep; and then something white and waving was before his eyes, and beyond was a pale green shimmer. He heard a gruff voice: