“What’s Willie Cowyard doing out in the rain?” one asked.
“Don’t you know he’s a fish?” another answered.
“At home in the water—not,” another commented.
Then their attention was diverted to something else that they had been watching.
No one was in the doctor’s apartment when Wilfred entered it. It was the little bay window room in Administration Shack. As he sat waiting, the rain beat against the four rounded adjoining windows affording him a wide view of the dismal scene outside. He felt nervous and expectant, he did not know just why. The cold, white metal furniture, the narrow, padded top, enameled table jarred him.
Hanging on its iron rack in a corner the skeleton, used for athletic demonstration, grinned at him, as if in ridicule of his application for full athletic privilege. The boisterous wind, wriggling through some crevice about the windows, stirred the bony legs ever so slightly; it seemed as if the thing were about to start across the room.
If Wilfred had not already received assurance that he was sound and well, he would have been troubled by the gravest apprehensions now. Even as it was the paraphernalia of the little room made him feel that something must be the matter with him. He waited anxiously, fearfully. But the young doctor did not come. And meanwhile the wind and rain beat outside.
Fifteen minutes, half an hour he waited, but the doctor did not come. Outside things became less tangible. The part of the lake that he could see seemed dissolving in the misty gloom and he could not distinguish the point where the opposite shore began. It seemed as if the lake extended up the mountainside.
Nervous from waiting, he removed his pin to adjust his scarf. The opal shone with a score of darting, flaming hues. The marvelous little gem looked the only bright thing in all the world; its mysterious depth seemed consumed with colorful fire. As he waited there flitted into Wilfred’s mind the old couplets that Allison Berry’s father had laughingly repeated when he presented the pin:
When it grows pale