Destiny | Page 8

in the lake.
But as she made her way along the twisting road she heard the rattle of
wheels on the rocks and turned to see a vehicle driven by a man who
obviously had no kinship with stony farms or lumber camps. She
paused, and the buggy came up. Its driver drew his horse down, and in
a singularly pleasing and friendly voice inquired:
"Can you tell me, little sister, how I can get to Middle Fork?"
Middle Fork was the village at the end of the six-mile mountain descent,
and Mary, who knew every trail and woodland path, told him, not only
of the road, but of a passable short-cut.
The girl 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 naïve 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