Then the woman wept aloud. “But not just yet,” they said. “You are very tired; your strength is gone. You shall rest for a time.”
Then one touched her eyes gently, and they closed to the light of this world!
Helen, dearest, I dreamed that story, and I was the woman who did not do her best. It always seems to me that I lived long ago somewhere—many lives perhaps. At times I can almost remember scenes and people of that far-off time. It may be that it was right here in this world, and that I have been sent back to do what I left undone. Or it may be that here in this life I shall not do what I ought to do, and must come again. Ever with me is the thought that there is some particular thing for me to do and that I must make haste to find it and do it, because the time is short.
Part of my work is to find my people—thy own people whom I knew in that far-away life, you are one of them, and—
The stranger laid the unfinished letter down and looked curiously at the author. He had not observed her closely until then. He saw in her face that which is higher than beauty, but is only seen and understood by its spiritual kindred. The mouth, that unmistakable key to character, because it is the door through which the soul expresses itself, was perfect in shape and exquisitely sensitive, though the other features had a dash of boyish ruggedness in them. But the eyes, the dark grey eyes, mottled with tawn, had in them a look, indefinable, yearning, appealing,—a look that might have ages of suffering behind it—and perhaps before it—that went to the stranger’s heart like a knife, and filled his eyes with a mist. In after years more than one strong spirit lost its strength and wept it knew not why, before that flash-light of a soul.
In the same moment the stranger saw another thing. It was that the child was entirely without self-consciousness and the consequent coquetry which so often spoils the manners of even very little women. She was not thinking how she appeared in his eyes. He could see that. It was nothing to her that her feet were naked, her hair twisted and her clothing crumpled. It was plain that these unconventional facts did not even present themselves to her mind. Her shoes and stockings and big straw hat lay near her on the grass, and she gave no sign of embarrassment because she was not arrayed in them. She met him on the ground of mind to mind. In her shining, yearning eyes was an eager interest.
“A free, original, aspiring spirit,” he mused. “Life will be a rough pilgrimage for her. She will find it hard to shape herself to iron-clad standards. The vast army of the commonplace, unable to understand her, will claw at her like birds of prey. It is a pity that she must be bruised and beaten into the usual shape, as she surely will be. But the world is a relentless potter, with inflexible ideas of how its human jugs and vases are to be modeled; and it shapes us all, in a measure, in spite of ourselves.”
“If the question isn’t impertinent, how old are you?” he asked, with a cadence of melancholy in his voice.
“Eleven; but I feel very old sometimes. Old, old, old!”
“Yet you are not old enough to be writing of loneliness,” he said.