Except for that she grew up just like any other girl, a favorite with the children, and a lovely dancer. Only there it was—she had something that other children didn't. It came and went, and when it went away she would grow dim like a smoky lamp. I got so used to it that it just seemed to me like a part of Moira. Nothing that marked her off from nobody, or that gave you anything like a queer and creepy feeling about her. Quite the contrary. She just seemed to have an abiding loveliness about her that everybody else ought to have but didn't, not so much.
When Kenneth Everett came along, "Well," thinks I, "I might have saved myself the worry." For worry I always had for fear that this other feeling of hers would cut her off from the regular things in life. It would have been all very well in another time in the world when a girl could go off and be a saint, but there was no such place for a girl to go in a town like ours.
There was no one but Moira for Kenneth from the first. He was as dark as she was fair; sunlight and starshine they seemed to me. It used to make me happy just to see him come storming in calling out, "Moira!" from the time he passed the Rose of Sharon bush at the gate.
Things in those days seemed right to me. Maybe I didn't see far enough; maybe I wanted too much for her—all the things it seems to me a woman in this life ought to have—and that I hadn't understood what made Moira the way she was. No wonder he loved her. I wish I could make you feel the way Moira looked. You had to feel it in your heart some way. She was fair and her face was tanned with the wind to a lovely golden color and her cheeks were smooth like ripe fruit and her eyes were blue and steady, so dark sometimes they seemed black—seeing eyes, that looked beyond what Mis' MacFarland called "the veil of things." She always seemed to me as if the spirit of the sea and the dunes between them was more her father and mother than anything else. That's a fanciful idea, but she gave you thoughts like that. She was the kind that makes even plain bodies like me fanciful.
There was days when she looked to me like something out of a lovely dream—if you can imagine a girl that's been dreamed by the sea and the dunes come true.
I can't quite tell when I first sensed what Kenneth felt about the times Moira was away, for as she went to the back country—you know how wild and secret that back country behind the town is—so there was what you might call the back country of the spirit she used to go to. I guess I found out how he felt one afternoon when he was waiting for her to come back from the dunes. She flew in as if she was helped by wings and she was listening—I'd got so used to it by now, it was so part of her, that I forgot how it might strike lots of folks.
He jumped toward her. "Oh, I've been waiting such a time, Moira! I'm so glad you're back!"
I knew he'd seen she was "away" and he was putting himself between her and whatever it was. For a moment she stood looking at him puzzled, as if it had taken her a minute to come back, and then she was as glad to see him as he was her.
"Well," thinks I, "when she gets married all her odd ways will go."
I took to watching them, and then and again I'd see him, as you might say, bring her back to real earth from the shining spot to which her thoughts went. Then sometimes after he'd go she'd be restless like she was when she was little when she'd lost "her good."