Mid-afternoon in August; a scarcely perceptible haze over the line of hills that marched northward into the St. Lawrence valley; and here, under the fir balsams back of the great dingy Morraway Hotel, coolness and quiet. Through the lower boughs of the balsams gleamed the lake, blue-black, unsounded, reticent. Behind their slender cone-darkened tops glistened the bare shoulders of Morraway Mountain in full sunlight; and overhead hung one of those caressing, taunting, weather-breeding skies that mark the turning point of the brief northern summer.
Curled up at one end of a broken rustic seat under the shadow of the balsams was a strenuous little woman of thirty-five, conscientiously endeavoring to relax. The habitual distress of her forehead was mitigated by a negligent, young-girlish manner of doing up her hair; she was carelessly dressed, too, and as she read aloud to her companion from The Journal of American Folklore she kept swinging one foot over the edge of the seat until the boot-lacings were dangling. The printed label upon the cover of the Journal bore the name of Miss Jane Rodman, Ph.D.
Miss Rodman's niece was stretched on the brown, fragrant, needle-covered slope, pretending to listen. Her face was turned dreamily toward the lake. Her head rested upon her left hand, which was long, sunburned, and bare of rings. In the palm of her right hand she balanced from time to time a little silver penknife, and then with a flash of her wrist buried the point in the balsam-needles, in a solitary and aimless game of mumble-the-peg. She was not particularly attracted by what her learned aunt was reading to her about the marriage rites of the Bannock Indians. In fact she buried the knife with a trifle more spirit than usual when the article came to an end.
Miss Rodman pencilled some ethnological notes upon the margin of the Journal. "There's another valuable article here, Olivia," she said, tentatively. "It's upon Blackfeet superstitions. Don't you think I'd better read that too?"
The younger woman nodded assent, without looking up. She was gloriously innocent of any scientific interest, and yet grateful for her aunt's endeavor to entertain her. Miss Rodman began eagerly, and Olivia Lane silently shifted her position and tried to play mumble-the-peg with her left hand. Ten minutes passed.
"Then there's a footnote," Miss Rodman was saying, mechanically. "Compare the Basque legend about the white blackbird whose singing restores sight to the blind."
The girl looked up suddenly. "What was that?" she asked.
"The white blackbird whose singing restores the sight to the blind," repeated Miss Rodman, in a softer voice.
Olivia moved restlessly and then sat up, with fingers clasped about her knees. There was a red tinge upon her round sun-browned cheek, where it had nestled in the palm of her hand. "A—white—blackbird?" she inquired, with the incredulous inflection of a child.