CHAPTER VI.
"CRAZY DIMIS" AND THE TWILIGHT SCENE.
"What are you thinking about, Phebe? I have watched you ever since we turned the corner down by the big pine tree, and not a muscle of your face has moved, as far as I can discover. Tell Willie, won't you?"
Phebe, thus addressed, drew herself up with a long sigh, and passing her hand mechanically across her forehead, replied, while her eyes remained seemingly fixed on some far-off object:
"I do not know. See how the sunshine falls in golden patches on the pond yonder, like what you read about this morning. Willie, I don't want to be Phebe—nothing but little Phebe. I—I want to fly! See that bird going up, up. He will get away beyond the clouds—far above the top of the mountain yonder. I want to be like him, or something, I do not know what; don't you, Willie?"
"Yes; though ambitions are not for one like me; but you will be something besides 'little Phebe,' by and by. I see it in your beaming face and deep dark eyes; while I must always be 'poor little Willie,' nothing else. I have for a long time been watching you, and reading my destiny of loneliness and utter dreariness in your strange, mysterious words, and knew that they all came from a heart that would never be satisfied with the plodding life where I must remain. Two paths are open to us, and I can even now see that they must branch off from each other. O Phebe, hard as it is to be as I am, I would not hold you, little bird, from your upward flight; but just think what a terrible night my future will be without my little Phebe! Then I shall have no sweet sister to comfort and cheer me when out of patience with myself and cross because of my infirmity. And I shall not be your own Willie as now. It is wrong, I know, to feel so, but I cannot help it! It is bitter enough to know that I must lose you, but your love, little sister, how can I live without that?"
Phebe was taking a seat beside him, where he had made room for her while speaking. And, without answering his moan of anguish, she clasped her arms about his neck and kissed his pale face over and over again.