“I am very glad to make your acquaintance, Miss Templeton,” Jack Kirke says. “It is good of you to receive me for Ruby’s sake.” He glances down at the child with one of his swift, bright smiles, and squeezes tighter the little hand which so confidingly clasps his.
“I’ve told Aunt Lena all about you, Jack,” Ruby proclaims in her shrill sweet voice. “She said she was quite anxious to see you after all I had said. Oh! Jack, can’t you stay Christmas with us? It would be lovely if you could.”
“We shall be very glad if you can make it convenient to stay and eat your Christmas dinner with us, Mr. Kirke,” Miss Templeton says. “In such weather as this, you have every excuse for postponing your journey to Greenock for a little.”
“Many thanks for your kindness, Miss Templeton,” the young man responds. “I should have been most happy, but that I am due at Greenock this afternoon at my mother’s. She is foolish enough to set great store by her unworthy son, and I couldn’t let her have the dismal cheer of eating her Christmas dinner all alone. Two years ago,” the young fellow’s voice softens as he speaks, “there were two of us. Nowadays I must be more to my mother than I ever was, to make up for Wat. He was my only brother”—all the agony of loss contained in that “was” no one but Jack Kirke himself will ever know—“and it is little more than a year now since he died. My poor mother, I don’t know how I had the heart to leave her alone last Christmas as I did; but I think I was nearly out of my mind at the time. Anyway I must try to make it up to her this year, if I possibly can.”
“Was Wat like you?” Ruby asks very softly. She has climbed on her long-lost friend’s knee, a habit Ruby has not yet grown big enough to be ashamed of, and sits, gazing up into those other brown eyes. “I wish I’d known him too,” Ruby says.
“A thousand times better,” Wat’s brother returns with decision. “He was the kindest fellow that ever lived, I think, though it seems queer to be praising up one’s own brother. If you had known Wat, Ruby, I would have been nowhere, and glad to be nowhere, alongside of such a fellow as him. Folks said we were like in a way, to look at; though it was a poor compliment to Wat to say so; but there the resemblance ended. This is his photograph,” rummaging his pocket-book—“no, not that one, old lady,” a trifle hurriedly, as one falls to the ground.
Ruby clambers down to pick it up. “Mayn’t I see it, Jack?” she petitions.
Jack Kirke grows rather red and looks a trifle foolish; but it is impossible to refuse the child’s request. Had Ruby’s aunt not been present, it is possible that he might not have minded quite so much.
“I like her face,” Ruby determines. “It’s a nice face.”
It is a nice face, this on the photograph, as the child has said. The face of a girl just stepping into womanhood, fair and sweet, though perhaps a trifle dreamy, but with that shining in the eyes which tells how to their owner belongs a gift which but few understand, and which, for lack of a better name, the world terms “Imagination.” For those who possess it there will ever be an added glory in the sunset, a softly-whispered story in each strain of soon-to-be-forgotten music, a reflection of God’s radiance upon the very meanest things of this earth. A gift which through all life will make for them all joy keener, all sorrow bitterer, and which they only who have it can fully comprehend and understand.