“You are lonely?” he said, with a sympathetic flexion of voice.
Her face brightened with a peculiarly luminous look, and her eyes held his.
“I imagine so. Even the most reserved being possesses some one he can call a friend. Perhaps you are jealous of conferring the epithet.”
Gabriel smiled, but the girl’s face was unceasingly solemn. Her expression, indeed, appeared to partake of the perpetual seriousness of an earnest nature. A calm, unconscious melancholy shone forth from her mind like a glimmer of sunlight reflected from some golden shrine.
“Your father must be something of a cynic.”
“In mind, too,” she said, with transcendent and ingenuous candor.
“I do not know,” she retorted, with a certain contemplative sincerity. “I have only read of love. I know Britomart and Florimel. I do not think Britomart would have loved my father.”
They lapsed suddenly into silence. The girl with the gray eyes was looking afar into the shadows of the woods. The water murmured at their feet, a calm, unceasing monologue like the soft prattle of a mother.
The silence proved but a prelude to one of the girl’s strange and flashing interrogations of the enigmas of life.
“Perhaps because I never talk to any one. People only speak to me in books. And one reads of so many gods—Zeus and Apollo, Allah and Christ, Venus, and great Ormuzd. Some mysterious sorrow often seems to tantalize my soul. All nature, the sea, the winds, yearn for something that can never be, and my soul echoes them. I stretch out my hands blindly, as to a dark sky. There should be power and light beyond, yet my heart gropes under the dim stars. There is often great hunger in me, hunger that I cannot satisfy. I yearn for something—what, I cannot tell. I wonder what we live for?”
Probably another half-hour passed before the girl rose from the grass with the consciousness of parting. Gabriel, soft-fibred pessimist, stood beside her with an utter sense of unreality bearing upon his brain.
She flushed a very little and her eyes kindled.
“I am feeling lonely for the first time in my life.”
She made a step towards him suddenly and extended her hand.
“You may kiss it,” she said. “They did that in the old days.”
But Gabriel rowed home slowly down the Mallan with his head bowed down in thought. There were certain words of an old legend stirring in his heart, and the girl’s eyes followed him.
