Kilmeny opened her eyes and looked straight into the mirror where, like a lovely picture in a golden frame, she saw herself reflected. For a moment she was bewildered. Then she realized what it meant. The lilies fell from her arm to the floor and she turned pale. With a little low, involuntary cry she put her hands over her face.
Eric pulled them boyishly away.
“Kilmeny, do you think you are ugly now? This is a truer mirror than Aunt Janet’s silver sugar bowl! Look—look—look! Did you ever imagine anything fairer than yourself, dainty Kilmeny?”
She was blushing now, and stealing shy radiant glances at the mirror. With a smile she took her slate and wrote naively,
“I think I am pleasant to look upon. I cannot tell you how glad I am. It is so dreadful to believe one is ugly. You can get used to everything else, but you never get used to that. It hurts just the same every time you remember it. But why did mother tell me I was ugly? Could she really have thought so? Perhaps I have become better looking since I grew up.”
“I think perhaps your mother had found that beauty is not always a blessing, Kilmeny, and thought it wiser not to let you know you possessed it. Come, let us go back to the orchard now. We mustn’t waste this rare evening in the house. There is going to be a sunset that we shall remember all our lives. The mirror will hang here. It is yours. Don’t look into it too often, though, or Aunt Janet will disapprove. She is afraid it will make you vain.”
Kilmeny gave one of her rare, musical laughs, which Eric never heard without a recurrence of the old wonder that she could laugh so when she could not speak. She blew an airy little kiss at her mirrored face and turned from it, smiling happily.
On their way to the orchard they met Neil. He went by them with an averted face, but Kilmeny shivered and involuntarily drew nearer to Eric.
“I don’t understand Neil at all now,” she wrote nervously. “He is not nice, as he used to be, and sometimes he will not answer when I speak to him. And he looks so strangely at me, too. Besides, he is surly and impertinent to Uncle and Aunt.”
“Don’t mind Neil,” said Eric lightly. “He is probably sulky because of some things I said to him when I found he had spied on us.”