A Fool There Was | Page 6

when they'd rather have
rocking horses.... I wish they'd hurry and bring that brother. I'm just
wild to see it!"

Jack Schuyler sat up.
"Well," he assured her, "They'll send over for you when it comes....
What shall we do now?"
He waited patiently for suggestions. Tom Blake and Kathryn Blair sat,
foreheads grooved in thought. At length Jack Schuyler cried suddenly:
"I know! Let's play leopard shooting! I saw a picture of one in the
geography. It looked just like Fiddles." Fiddles was the plethoric
Maltese member of the Blake family. "We've got those tin guns, and
we can stalk it. What do you say?"
That which they said was later evidenced; for when Thomas Cathcart
Blake entered the front door of his residence that night and started up
the stairs, he was met by an excited feline, followed by three equally
excited children. And the cat, on seeing him, its cosmogony disrupted
to such an extent that it felt itself no longer able to distinguish friend
from foe, tried to turn back with the result that its first pursuer fell over
it. There was the added result that the next two pursuers tripped upon
the sprawling form of the first. And Thomas Cathcart Blake had great
difficulty in preventing himself from joining the sprawling parade that
tumbled past him to the foot of the stairs, and lay at the bottom, a heap
of tossing legs and arms and ribbons and fur.

[Illustration]
CHAPTER FOUR.
THE CHILD AND THE STRANGER.
It is of necessity that a story such as this should be episodical, lapsical,
disconnected. Its inception lies in two countries, and of different people.
And it is, in its beginnings, a story of contrasts. So one may be
permitted again to say: At a time when pompous, ponderous,
white-whiskered, black-suited old Dr. DeLancey was engaged in

bringing to the daughter of Kathryn Blair a posthumous baby brother
that, in the mystery of things, turned out after all to be a sister, a
stranger chanced to be riding at dusk through the deep shades of the
Bois du Nord, in Brittany. The path was overhung with spreading
boughs; it was tumbled with the wood-litter of a decade. His horse
went slowly, lifting each forefoot daintily and placing it carefully. And
the stranger permitted the animal to take its own time.
At length he came to a turning. The huge bole of a great oak was at his
left. He rounded it. His horse raised its head, nostrils distended, eyes
alert, and stopped.
The stranger looked up. It was a strange picture that met his eyes....
At first he did not believe that that which he saw was human. It seemed
like some nymph of the wood; for there are nymphs in the Bois du
Nord, you know, many of them. Anyone who lives there will tell you
that.
But then his eyes fell upon a tumbled heap of clothing; and he knew
that it was not a nymph, after all. For nymphs do not wear clothing.
There was a little woodland pool before him. The sun, straining
through the great, heavy-leafed boughs, specked it with blots and
blotches of gold. Beside it there sat the figure of a girl, naked. She sat
there, her slender legs beneath her, her slender body leaning upon one
rounded, white arm. Great masses of dead-black hair fell about her
glowing shoulders, half covering the arm which supported her. Her
other hand clasped her knee. Her dark eyes were gazing before her
toward the trunk of the oak. The stranger felt that she knew that he was
there; and yet she had not looked at him.
On the bole of the oak was a squirrel. It was motionless, as though
carved out of the trunk itself. Beneath it lay coiled a snake. Its eyes
were fastened upon those of the squirrel and its flat, ugly head was
moving gently to and fro--to and fro--the while its forked tongue
played back and forth between its fangs.

They waited there, the stranger and the naked girl. They waited for a
long, long time....
By and by the squirrel moved a little. One forefoot crept slowly down
the bark of the oak--and then the other--the one hind foot--and then its
mate.... And the squirrel was nearer to the snake.
Again they waited, the stranger and the naked girl.... The squirrel crept
yet further down the trunk, toward the slow-shifting venomous head....
The horse snorted.... The squirrel raised its head; and darted up the tree
trunk. It was gone. And the snake slid noiselessly off into the
underbrush.... The naked girl turned dark, deep eyes upon the stranger.
She seemed not to mind her nakedness. And to him it seemed not
strange that she should not. The horror of it