This was too much for me. I am a landlubber when it comes to salt water, and have never been able to endure a woman’s tears. I hastened out and put my hand upon her shoulder.
“Mrs. Kirsten,” I said, very gently, “you are troubled. Let me help you!”
“Oh, sir,” she answered, breaking down utterly at the unexpected sympathy, “you cannot help me—no one can! The most celebrated physicians and alienists have given up the case.”
“Dear Mrs. Kirsten, Miranda the First,” I continued, “you can at least tell me. Two heads are three times as good as one if the extra head is mine.” To the critical reader this may sound egotistical, but the situation was tense, and it was no more than the truth.
“Oh, how can I bear to tell you! I, who have always lived a decent, respectable life, holding my head as high as my neighbours’ heads, I, to have this shame, this fear!”
“Dear Miranda the First,” I pleaded, forgetting all conventional forms, “tell me! Believe me, I am your friend!”
“I know it,” she cried, “but it is too terrible! Miranda, my darling little daughter, my own and only child, is—is—is—is——”
“A Little Sister to the Woods!” she gasped, then hid her face against my shoulder.
With rare comprehension, for a man, I only stroked the weeper’s spine and said nothing. At last her sobs quieted. “You do not despise me?” she asked, tremulously.
“Despise you?” I repeated. “No, dear lady, no!”
When she was calm, she told me the whole miserable story. From her birth, Miranda the Second had been exceedingly fond of animals and had refused to associate with children at all. She drew animals of all kinds as a sheet of sticky fly-paper draws Flies. She made friends with Lizards, Spiders, Toads, Bumblebees, Hornets, Foxes, Wasps, Rabbits,—in fact everything that crossed her path, with the single exception of Snakes. For three days she had been lost, and when she was finally discovered, it was in the wake of an Italian who had a dancing Bear. Miranda wept bitterly when the police took her home, and for over a week she raged and screamed, demanding with every breath to be taken back to the “pitty Bear.”
It was only upon the promise of seeing plenty of Bears that she had quieted down at all, and her mother had brought her to Yellowstone Park, knowing that the animals there would be practically harmless, especially to one of Miranda’s gifts, and in the hope that satiety might work a cure.