Destiny | Page 8

had come to judge human faces through the eyes of her own circumstance, and those of the men and women about her wore for the most part the resignation of surrender and hardship, but this man's face was different. He was a man to her eleven years, though a more experienced eye would have seen that he was hardly more than a prematurely old boy. Lines traced a network around his eyes, but they were whimsical lines such as come from persistent laughter--the sort of laughter that insists on expressing itself even in the face of misfortune. His open mackinaw collar revealed a carelessly knotted scarf decorated with a large black pearl, and as he drew off a glove she noticed that his brown hand was slender and that one finger wore a heavily carved ring, from whose quaint setting glowed the cool, bright light of an emerald. Her frank curiosity showed so plainly in her face that the fine wrinkles about the young man's eyes became little radiants of amusement centering around gray pupils and his lips parted in a smile over very even teeth.
There are a few men in the world whom we feel that we have always known, when once we have seen them, and upon whom we find ourselves bestowing confidences as soon as we have said, "Good-day." Perhaps they are the isolated survivors of knight-errant days, whose business it is to listen to the troubles of others.
It was only the matter of minutes before Mary was chatting artlessly with this traveler of the mountain road, and since she was a child she was talking of herself, while he nodded gravely and listened with a deference of attention that was to her new and disarmingly charming.
He, too, was just now an exile here in the hills, he explained, but before he came he had lived all over the world. He had studied under tutors while traveling about the Continent, and being prepared to take up his work in the banking house which his grandfather had established and his father had extended in scope. Then it had happened.
"What happened?" The child of Lake Forsaken put the question eagerly, and his reply was laconic, though he smiled down from the buggy seat with a peculiarly na?ve twist of his lips. "Bugs," he told her.
"What kind of bugs?" It seemed strange to Mary that a man would let such small creatures as flies or spiders or even big beetles stand between himself and a great bank.
"I beg your pardon," he laughed. "I forgot that you lived in a world unsullied by such argot. You know what a lunger is?"
That she did know. It is a term familiar enough in the mountains to which come refugees from the white plague, seeking in the tonic air a healing for their sickened lungs.
"And so you see," said the strange young man, "I have built me a log shack back in the hills where I amuse myself writing verses--which, fortunately, no one reads--and doing equally inconsequential things. Now I'm going down for a few days in the city. I can only go when the weather is fine and when winter sets in, I must come back and bury myself with no companions except some books and a pair of snowshoes."
"Are you going to die?" she asked him in large-eyed concern.
"Some day I am," he laughed. "But I'm rather stubborn. I'm going to postpone that as long as possible. Several doctors tell me that I have an even chance. It seems to be a sort of fifty-fifty bet between the bugs and me. I suppose a fellow oughtn't to ask more than an even break."
She stood regarding him with vast interest. She had never known a man before who chatted so casually about the probable necessity of dying. He grew as she watched him to very interesting and romantic proportions.
"What's your name?" she demanded.
"My last name's Edwardes," he told her. And it was only her own out-of-the-world ignorance that kept her from recognizing in the name a synonym for titanic finance. "In front of that they put a number of ridiculous prefixes when I was quite young and helpless. There is Jefferson and Doorland and others. At college they called me Pup."
In return for his confidence, the girl told him who she was and where she lived and how old she was.
"You say your name is Mary Burton? I must remember that because in, say ten years, provided I last that long, I expect to hear of you."
"Hear of me? Why?" she demanded.
The stranger bent forward and coughed, and when the paroxysm had ended he smiled whimsically again.
"I'll tell you a secret, though God knows it's a perilous thing to feed a woman's vanity--even a woman of eleven. Did anyone ever tell you that