"Oh, no!" she half whispered, eyeing the book in his hand wistfully. "Oh, no! That makes me feel different. I—I love the wind."
"What's that?" Mrs. Storrs entered quickly. "Now, Sarah, you just stop that nonsense! Mr. Willard, has she been tellin' you any foolishness?"
"Miss Storrs had only told me that she liked the wind," he replied, hoping that the woman would go, and let him develop at leisure what promised to be a most interesting situation. She had really very pretty, even teeth, and when she smiled her lips curved pleasantly.
But Mrs. Storrs was not to be evaded. She had evidently a grievance to set forth, and looking reproachfully at her daughter, continued:
"Ever since Sarah was five or six years old she's had that crazy likin' for the wind. 'Tain't natural, I say, and when the gales that we hev up here strike us, the least anybody can do 's to stay in the house and thank Providence they've got a house to stay in! Why, Mr. Willard, you'd never think it to look at her, for she's a real quiet girl—too quiet, seems to me, sometimes, when I'm just put to it for somebody to be social with—but in thet big gale of eighty-eight she was out all night in it, and me and her father—that was before Mr. Storrs died—nearly crazy with fearin' she was lost for good. And when she was six years old, she got up from her crib and went out on the beach in her little nightgown, and nothin' else, and it's a miracle she didn't die of pneumonia, if not of bein' blown to death."
Mrs. Storrs stopped for breath, and Willard glanced at the girl, wondering if she would appear disconcerted or angry at such unlooked-for revelation of her eccentricity; but her face had settled into its usual impassive lines, and she dusted the chairs serenely, turning now and then to look fixedly through the window at the swaying elm whose boughs leaned to the ground under the still rising wind.
Her mother was evidently relieving the strain of an enforced silence, and sitting stiffly in her chair, as one not accustomed to the luxury of idle conversation, she continued:
"And even now, when she's old enough to know better, you'd think, she acts possessed. Any wind-storm 'll set her off, but when the spring gales come, she'll just roam 'round the house, back and forth, staring out of doors, and me as nervous as a cat all the while. Just because I won't let her go out she acts like a child. Why, last year I had to go out and drag her in by main force; I was nearly blown off the cliff gettin' her home. And she was singin', calm, as if she was in her bed like any decent person! It's the most unnatural thing I ever heard of! Now, Sarah Storrs," as the girl was slipping from the room, "you remember you promised me not to go out this year after supper, if the wind was high. You mind, now! It's comin' up an awful blow."
The girl turned abruptly. "I never promised you that, mother," she said quickly. "I said I wouldn't if I could help it, and if I can't help it, I can't, and that's all there is to it." The door closed behind her, and shortly afterwards Willard left Mrs. Storrs in possession of the room.
The day affected him strangely. The steady low moan of the wind was by this time very noticeable. It was not cold, only clear and rather keen, and the scurrying grey clouds looked chillier than one found the air on going out. The boom of the surf carried a sinister threat with it, and the birds drove helplessly with the wind-current, as if escaping some dreaded thing behind them.