Fanny's First Novel

by Frank Frankfort Moore

And she started reading the book that same day, an hour before sunset. The room in which they sat was a small one with a window facing the west and overlooking a long stretch of billowy common. The spicy scent of the wallflowers in the little garden patch at the side of the house was wafted through the half-open lattice, and occasionally there came the sound of the ducks gabbling at the pool beyond the gate that shut off the house from the lane. It was a cloudless evening, and the sunset promised to be peach-like in its tender tints of pink and saffron with the curves of delicate green in the higher sky. Fanny sat at the window and the old man reclined at his ease upon the sofa.

“I am giving myself every chance,” he said. “All that I ask of you, my Fannikin, is that you do not glance at me every now and again to see if I am still awake. If you do so, I shall never yield to so much as a doze.”

“I promise faithfully to await your signal that you are alert,” said she.

And so began one of the most delightful hours of her life.

She was not a particularly good reader aloud when a book was casually put into her hands, but here she had before her a volume that she could almost have repeated verbatim, so that she soon found that she was just too fluent: she felt that if she went on at this rate his critical ear would tell him that she had every page by heart, and he would ask her for an explanation of so singular a thing as her being able to repeat so much of a book which she professed to have in her hands for the first time. She put a check upon her fluency, and though she did not go so far as to simulate stumbling over certain words, she neglected the punctuation now and again, and then went back upon some of the passages, causing him to give a little grumble and say:

“Be careful, my dear; there's no need for haste: the evening is still young.”

After that she was more careful—which is the same as saying she was more careless of adhering to the scheme she had adopted. She felt that as he had now been put off the scent, she might run along as she pleased without there being a chance of his suspecting anything through her showing herself familiar with passage after passage.

Before she had got through more than a dozen pages she heard a creaking of the sofa—she trusted herself to glance in that direction and found that he was no longer reclining: he was sitting up and listening attentively. She continued reading without making a remark for a full hour. The sun had set, but the twilight was clear enough to allow of her seeing the print on the page before her for some time still; then the darkness seemed to fall all at once, and she laid the book down when she had come to the close of one of the letters.

“Candles,” he said. “Candles! Upon my word, the world is right for once: the stuff is good. We must have candles. Candles, I say!”

“Supper, say I,” cried Fanny. “I feel that I have need of bodily refreshment after such a task. Does it sound real to you, Daddy Crisp—all about the Young Lady who is about to enter the world?”