The girl coloured, pleased with the genuine and unexpected compliment. But she turned it to account.
“Then it is possible for the ornamental to be useful, isn’t it?”
The setting sun was crimsoning the fleecy clouds far overhead, and throwing long shadows in the warm August evening. Everywhere was the smell of ripening wheat. The tinkle of a cowbell came up from the distance; a meadowlark sang its short liquid tune from a neighbouring fence post.
“Hi guess you’re right,” said the boy, after a long pause: “Hi guess hit’s worth while bein’ beautiful. Per’aps hit’s jist has himportant to be beautiful has to raise w’eat hand milk cows, but nobody hever talked that wy to me before.”
“It’s worth thinking about, Wilfred. So many people in this country have not learned that ‘the life is more than food, and the body more than raiment.’ They can see the use of potatoes, but not of poetry. And they are in such a hurry! Such a hurry to live, one would think they wanted to get their lives over with. Poise and repose are lost arts.”
She was looking at the gathering dusk in the east, and spoke as though soliloquizing with herself. London brought her back to earth.
“Hi don’t know hall you sy, but hi know wothever you sy his roight,” he declared, with sincere gallantry. “Hand Miss Vane, can Hi come at noights w’enhever Hi can sneak away, an’—talk with you, loike we did to-noight?”
“Yes, Wilfred, you may come whenever you can, and we will talk about things that are beautiful, and things that are useful. And we will try to remember that there is nothing so beautiful as a useful life, and nothing so useful as a beautiful life. And there is nothing so precious as—a friend.”
She took the hand of the boy, so long friendless, in her own, and in that moment the soul of the little Barnardo orphan burst the bonds of eighteen years’ environment and lit up the face of a man.
This evening’s conversation was the first of many. Wilfred was an artist at devising reasons and excuses for visiting Grants’. And soon an unlooked-for opportunity presented itself. Miss Vane had taken a deep interest in the boy, and did not hesitate to enlist her cousins in a little plan for setting Wilfred at liberty in the evenings. Accordingly, George Grant called on Riles, and, after the customary commonplaces about the weather and the crops, mentioned his desire to get a boy to sit up for an hour or two at night to watch the smudge fires, and put them out after the cattle had settled down. Could Mr. Riles spare London from nine to eleven for a job like that? They would either pay him in money for the boy’s services, or allow it when they exchanged labour in threshing time. But perhaps London had enough to do as it was, and would be better in bed after his day’s——.