“The conceit of women!” he exclaimed, with a smile in which brotherly love and the spirit of teasing were about equally blended. “No, no, Cis, I’m not going to let you spoil me. I shall be up again in ten minutes. Have you not made any friends here? Is there no one on deck you can talk to?”
“I don’t want to talk,” said Cecil. “Truth to tell, I am longing to get away from all these English people. Very unsociable of me, isn’t it?”
Roy Boniface turned away with a smile, understanding her feeling well enough, and Cecil, with her back to the chattering tourist throng, let her eyes roam over the shining waters of the fjord to the craggy mountains on the further shore, whose ever-varying forms had been delighting her since the early morning.
She herself made a fair picture, though her beauty was not of the order which quickly draws attention. There was nothing very striking in her regular features, fair complexion, and light-brown hair; to a casual observer she would have seemed merely an average English girl, gentle, well-mannered, and nice-looking. It was only to those who took pains to study her that her true nature was revealed; only at times that her quiet gray eyes would flash into sudden beauty with the pleasure of meeting with some rare and unexpected sympathy; only in some special need that the force of her naturally retiring nature made itself felt as a great influence.
Cecil had passed a year of emancipated girlhood, she had for a whole year been her own mistress, had had time and money at her disposal and no special duties to take the place of her school-work. It was the time she had been looking forward to all her life, the blissful time of grown-up freedom, and now that it had come it had proved a disappointing illusion. Whether the fault was in herself or in her circumstances she did not know; but like so many girls of her age she was looking out on life with puzzled eyes, hardly knowing what it was that had gone amiss, yet conscious of a great want, of a great unrest, of a vague dissatisfaction which would not be reasoned down.
“Cecil is looking poorly,” had been the home verdict; and the mother, not fully understanding the cause, but with a true instinct as to the remedy, had suggested that the brother and sister should spend a month abroad, grieving to lose Cecil from the usual family visit to the seaside, but perceiving with a mother’s wisdom and unselfishness that it was time, as she expressed it, for her young one to try its wings.
So the big steamer plied its way up the fjord bearing Cecil Boniface and her small troubles and perplexities to healthy old Norway, to gain there fresh physical strength, and fresh insights into that puzzling thing called life; to make friendships, spite of her avowed unsociableness, to learn something more of the beauty of beauty, the joy of joy, and the pain of pain.
She was no student of human nature; at present with girlish impatience she turned away from the tourists, frankly avowing her conviction that they were a bore. She was willing to let her fancy roam to the fortunes of some imaginary Rolf and Erica living, perhaps, in some one or other of the solitary red-roofed cottages to be seen now and then on the mountain-side; but the average English life displayed on the deck did not in the least awaken her sympathies, she merely classified the passengers into rough groups and dismissed them from her mind. There was the photographic group, fraternizing over the cameras set up all in a little encampment at the forecastle end. There was the clerical group, which had for its center no fewer than five gaitered bishops. There was the sporting group, distinguished by light-brown checked suits, and comfortable traveling-caps. There was the usual sprinkling of pale, weary, overworked men and women come for a much-needed rest. And there was the flirting group—a notably small one, however, for Norwegian traveling is rough work and is ill-suited to this genus.
“Look, here, Blanche,” exclaimed a gray-bearded Englishman, approaching a pretty little brunette who had a most sweet and winsome expression, and who was standing so near to the camp-stool on which Cecil had ensconced herself that the conversation was quite audible to her. “Just see if you can’t make out this writing; your eyes are better than mine. It is from Herr Falck, the Norwegian agent for our firm. I dare say your father told you about him.”
“Yes, papa said he was one of the leading merchants out here and would advise us what to see, and where to go.”