“It is a fact,” he said. “Ever since I was a small boy I have had to drive all my brains and energy at other things. I have been only an onlooker at games of that sort, big and little; and as I didn’t know the rules, and couldn’t guess them by looking, I wasn’t an interested onlooker. But I have learned a great deal since I landed in this clearing; and this very morning Ned Tone tried to lose me in the woods simply to keep me away from here. Nothing like that ever happened to me before.”
Catherine colored slightly.
“I wonder if you know anything of the horrors of loneliness,” she said in a low voice.
“I have been lonely in cities and on crowded roads,” he replied; “and I have been lonely in the air, sometimes with the old earth like a colored map below me and flying blind in the fog, and with sunlit clouds under me like fields and drifts of solid snow.”
“But you had your work,” she said; “and you were not always alone; and in crowds you were always elbowed by strangers. I have never seen a crowd of people. You have not known such loneliness as this—of endless woods, and empty clearings, and winds lost in everlasting tree-tops, and empty skies with only a speck of a hawk circling high up. You worked and fought—but I had nothing to do. But for books I’d have gone mad, I believe.”
“I can imagine it—but I wish you would tell me all about it.”
At that moment the expression of her eyes changed and she got quickly up from the table.
“What if Grandfather tells Ned Tone about your arrival!” she exclaimed. “About the devil he is looking for? Ned is from the settlements. He often goes out to the towns on the main river. He would know it was an aëroplane, and he would suspect the truth about you.”
“He may not mention it,” said Akerley; “so why go to meet trouble?”
Then he did a thing that astonished himself more than it seemed to surprise Catherine. He stood up, stepped around the table and took her passive right hand awkwardly in his.