Doris's eyes came back to the book-muslin with a keener interest. As she sat there, sewing and singing, in the soft light that filtered through the old curtain, the girl was beautiful, almost tragically beautiful, for her uncertain place in the world. Her slender throat, like the stem of a white flower, arose from the faded brown of her dress as an Easter lily unfolds from its dull sheath. Her radiant hair, yellow as new-blown marigolds, clustered thick and soft about her fair forehead, as the rich pollen falls on the lily's satin. Her delicate brows were dark and straight; and her curling lashes, darker still, threw bewitching shadows around her large, brown eyes. Her face was pale with a warm pallor infinitely fairer than any mere fairness. Her lips, which were a little full, but exquisite in shape and sweetness, were tinted as delicately as blush roses. Her small, white hands, with their rosy palms and tapering fingers, bore no traces of hard work. But Doris was not thinking of her hands as, without turning her head, she put out one of them for another length of thread. The spool was a very small one, and it stood rather unsteadily on the uneven ledge of the window, and it rolled when Doris touched it. Instinctively she tried to catch it, and to keep it from falling to the ground outside the window. She had been reared to neatness and order, and to economy which valued even a reel of cotton too much to see it needlessly soiled. Of course Doris tried to catch the falling spool,—and that was the way everything began! It was all as simple and natural and purely accidental as anything could have been. And yet at the same time it was one of those inscrutable happenings which make the steadiest of us seem but feathers in the wind of destiny.
Only a moment before that foolish little spool began to roll, the big road seemed entirely deserted. Not a human being was in sight—Doris was sure that there was not, because she had looked and looked in vain, and had longed and longed that there might be. Nevertheless, as the little reel started to fall, and Doris darted after it as suddenly and swiftly as a swallow, there was a young man on horseback directly in front of the window, appearing as strangely and as unexpectedly as if he had sprung out of the earth. And, moreover, he was looking straight at Doris, with hardly more than a couple of rods between them, when she burst into full view in the broad light of day, appearing like some beautiful bacchante. The white curtain fell behind her radiant head as the breeze caught and loosed the golden strands of her hair, and the sun flashed a greater radiance upon its dazzling crown. She saw him, too, with a startled uplifting of her great shadowy dark eyes as she bent forward—while her exquisite face was still smiling at her own innocent thoughts, and her rose-red lips were still a little apart with the singing of the old love-song.
The white curtain then swung again into place. It was full of thin spots which Doris could see through; but she was so startled, and her heart was beating so fast at first, that she shrunk back without trying to look. How right her mother had been, after all. That was her first feeling. When she recovered self-possession enough to peep out, she saw that the young man's horse was curveting back and forth across the big road in a most alarming manner. This continued for a surprising length of time before Doris observed that, whenever the horse seemed about to stop, the rider touched him with the spur. Such a flash of indignation went over Doris then as quite swept away the last trace of embarrassment. How could he do such a cruel and such a meaningless thing! She wondered still more why he dismounted, and, throwing the bridle reins over his arm, began walking up and down in front of the window, gazing closely at the ground as though looking for something that he had lost. Doris noticed that he glanced at the window every time he passed it, and she knew that she ought to go out and help him find what he had lost. That was a matter of course in Oldfield manners. It is the way of most country people to take a keen and helpful interest in everything that a neighbor does; and city people deserve less credit than they claim for their indifference to their neighbor's affairs, which is too often mere selfishness disguised. Notwithstanding this local social law Doris did not stir, held motionless by an influence which she could not understand. She had known at once who the young man was. Too few strangers came to Oldfield for her to fail to place him immediately as the grandson of old lady Gordon, the young gentleman from Boston, whose coming everybody was talking about. She noted through the worn places in the old curtain how tall he was and how dark and how handsome. She could not decide what kind of clothes his riding clothes were. At last he mounted his horse and galloped up the hill, and then Doris returned serenely to the darning of the book-muslin party coat.
VII
THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA
Within the hour Lynn Gordon rode back down the hill, and passed the window very slowly, watching the curtain as a star-gazer awaits the passing of a cloud.
The baffling width of white cotton hung still unstirred; Doris was no longer sitting behind it, but the young man had no means of knowing that she had gone. As the hand on the reins unconsciously drew the horse almost to a standstill, the doctor and his wife left their seats on the porch of their house over the way, and came out to the gate to speak to him. They had met him at his grandmother's on the previous evening, and they had been old friends of his father. Lynn sprang from the saddle and, leading his horse, crossed the big road to shake hands with them.
"Have you lost something?" asked Mrs. Alexander.
"Oh, no—yes—I have lost a jewel—a pearl," the young man replied rashly.