At the eastern window sat Edith Yorke, eleven years of age, with a large book on her knees. Over this book, some illustrated work on natural history, she had been bending for an hour, her loose mop of tawny hair falling each side of the page. So cloistered, her profile was invisible; but, standing in front of her, one could see an oval face with regular features full of calm earnestness. Bright, arched lips, and a spirited curve in the nostrils, saved this face from the cold look which regular features often give. The large, drooping eyelids promised large eyes, the forehead was wide and not high, the brows long, slightly arched, and pale-brown in color, and the whole face, neck, hands, and wrists were tanned to a light quadroon tint. But where the coarse sleeve had slipped up was visible an arm of dazzling whiteness. Outside the window, and but two rods distant, hung a crumbling clay bank, higher than the house, with a group of frightened alder-bushes looking over the top, and holding on with all their roots. Some day, in spite of their grip—the sooner, perhaps, because of its stress—the last frail hold was to be loosed, and the bushes were to come sliding down the bank, faster and faster, to pitch headlong into the mire at the bottom, with a weak crackling of all their poor doomed branches.
Presently the child looked up, with lights coming and going in her agate-colored eyes. "How wonderful frogs are!" she exclaimed involuntarily.
There was no reply.
She glanced at her two companions, scarcely conscious of them, her mind full of something else. "But everything is wonderful, when you come to think of it," she pursued dreamily.
Mr. Rowan took the pipe from his mouth, turned his forbidding face, and glowered at the girl. "You're a wonderful fool!" he growled; then resumed his pipe, feeling better, apparently, for that expression of opinion. His wife glanced up, furtive and frightened, but said nothing.
Edith looked at the man unmoved, saw him an instant, then, still looking, saw him not. After a while she became aware, roused herself, and bent again over the book. Then there was silence, broken only by the snapping of the fire, the snip of Mrs. Rowan's scissors, and the lame, one-sided ticking of an old-fashioned clock on the mantelpiece.
After a while, as the child read, a new thought struck up. "That's just like! Don't you think"—addressing the company—"Major Cleaveland said yesterday that I had lightning-bugs in my eyes!"
Without removing his pipe, Mr. Rowan darted an angry look at his wife, whose face became still more frightened. "Dear me!" she said feebly, "that child is an idjut!"
This time the long, fading gaze dwelt on the woman before it went back to the book again. But the child was too closely ensphered in her own life to be much, if at all, hurt. Besides, she was none of theirs, nor of their kind. Her soul was no dying spark struggling through ashes, but a fire, "alive, and alive like to be," as children say when they wave the fire-brand, winding live ribbons in the air; and no drop of their blood flowed in her veins.
The clock limped over ten minutes more, and the patch was got into its place, after a fashion, botched somewhat, with the knots on the outside. Mr. Rowan took the coat, grumbled at it, put it on, and went out, glancing back at the child as he opened the door. She was looking after him with an expression which he interpreted to mean aversion and contempt. Perhaps he mistook. May be she was wondering at him, what sort of strange being he was. Edith Yorke was very curious regarding the world she had got into. It seemed to her a queer place, and that she had at present not much concern in it.