Michael was staggered by the confession of this shocking and precocious child, as one after another his chimeras rose up to leer at him triumphantly.
“And did he make love to you? Did he try to kiss you?” Michael choked out.
“Oh, no,” said Stella. “That would have spoilt it all.”
Michael sighed under a faint lightening of his load, and Stella came up to him engagingly to slip her arm into his.
“Don’t be angry with me, Michael, because I have wanted so dreadfully to be great friends with you and tell you all my secrets. I want to tell you what I think about when I’m playing; and, Michael, you oughtn’t to be angry with me, because you were simply just made to be told secrets. That’s why I played so well last night. I was telling you a secret all the time.”
“Do you know what it is, Stella?” said Michael, with a certain awe in his voice. “I believe our father is in an asylum, and I believe you and I are both mad—not raving mad, of course—but slightly mad.”
“All geniuses are,” said Stella earnestly.
“But we aren’t geniuses.”
“I am,” murmured Stella in a strangely quiet little voice that sounded in Michael’s ears like the song of a furtive melodious bird.
“Are you?” he whispered, half frightened by this assertion, delivered under huge overarching trees in the burning silence of the forest. “Who told you so?”