Destiny | Page 9

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
you are possessed of a marvelous pair of eyes?"
Instinctively little Mary Burton flinched as though she had been struck
and she raised one hand to her face to touch her long lashes. Silent tears
welled up; tears of indignant pain because she thought she was being
cruelly ridiculed.
But the stranger had no such thought. If to the uneducated opinion of
Lake Forsaken, Mary's face was a matter for jest and libel, the
impression made on the young man who had been reared in the capitals
of Europe was quite different. He had been sent, on the verge of
manhood, into the hermit's seclusion with the hermit's opportunity of
reflecting on all he had seen, and digesting his experience into a
philosophy beyond his years.
Perhaps had Mary been born into her own Puritan environment two
centuries earlier, she might have faced even sterner criticism, for there
was without doubt a strange uncommonplaceness about her which the
thought of that day might have charged to the attendance of witches
about her birth. The promise of beauty she had, but a beauty unlike that
of common standards. It was a quality that at first caught the beholder
like the shock of a plunge into cold water, and then set him tingling
through his pulses--also like a plunge into an icy pool.
To the farmer folk Mary was merely "queer," but as the man in the
buggy sat looking down at her he realized the promise of something
strangely gorgeous. As she shifted her position a shaft of mellow
sunlight struck her face and it was as though her witch--or
fairy--godmother had switched on a blaze of color.
"I wasn't making fun of you," declared the stranger; and his voice held
so simple and courteous a note that Mary smiled again and was
reassured.
The child was still thin and awkward and undeveloped of line or
proportion, but color, which many painters will tell you is the
soul-essence of all beauty, she had in the same wasteful splendor that

the autumn woods had it in their carnival abundance.
Her hair was heavy, and its gold was of the lustrous and burnished sort
that seems to tangle in its meshes a captive fire glowing between the
extremes of amber and tawny copper. Yet hair and cheeks and lips were
only the minors of her color scheme. The eyes were regnantly dominant
and it was here that the surprising witch-like quality held sway. The
school-children had said they did not match, and they did not, for with
the sun shining on her the man in the buggy realized that the right one
was a rich brown like illuminated agate with a fleck or two of jet across
the iris, while the left, its twin, was of a colorful violet and deeply vivid.
Young Edwardes had read of the weird beauty of such mismated eyes,
but had never before seen them.
"Jove!" he exclaimed, and he let the reins hang on his knees as he bent
forward and talked enthusiastically.
"There are eyes and eyes," he smiled down. "Some are merely lenses to
see with and some are stars. Of the star kind, a few are lustrous and
miraculous, and control destinies. I think yours are like that. One can
flash lambent fire and the other can soften like the petals of a black
pansy--it has just that touch of inky purple--and in their range are many
possibilities."
"But--but," she stammered for a moment, irresolute and almost tearful,
"they aren't even mates and anyway eyes aren't all." For a moment she
hesitated, then with childish abandon confided, "I'd give anything in the
world to be pretty."
The stranger threw back his head and laughed. "And when they are
misty, let men beware," he commented half-aloud, then he went on:
"What makes you think you'll be ugly?"
"They call me spindle-legs at school and--and--" she broke off, failing
to particularize further.
The man glanced smilingly down at the slight figure.

"Well, now," he conceded, "in general effect you