The Christian | Page 4

can live without seeing her!" Near the end of the fourth year he sent his last answer: "Dear Wife--This separation is bitter; but God has willed it, and we must not forget that the probabilities are that we may pass our lives apart." The next letter was from the English consul on the Gaboon River, announcing the death of the devoted missionary.
Parson Quayle's household consisted only of himself and two maiden daughters, but that was too much for the lively young Frenchwoman. While her husband lived, she suffocated under the old-maid régime; and when he was gone she made no more fight with destiny, but took some simple ailment, and died suddenly.
A bare hillside frowned down on the place where Glory was born; but the sun rose over it, and a beautiful river hugged its sides. A quarter of a mile down the river there was a harbour, and beyond the harbour a bay, with the ruins of an old castle standing out on an islet rock, and then the broad sweep of the Irish Sea-the last in those latitudes to "parley with the setting sun." The vicarage was called Glenfaba, and it was half a mile outside the fishing town of Peel.
Glory was a little red-headed witch from the first, with an air of general uncanniness in everything she did and said. Until after she was six there was no believing a word she uttered. Her conversation was bravely indifferent to considerations of truth or falsehood, fear or favour, reward or punishment. The parson used to say, "I'm really afraid the child has no moral conscience--she doesn't seem to know right from wrong." This troubled his religion, but it tickled his humour, and it did not disturb his love. "She's a perfect pagan--God bless her innocent heart!"
She had more than a child's genius for make-believe. In her hunger for child company, before the days when she found it for herself, she made believe that various versions of herself lived all over the place, and she would call them out to play. There was Glory in the river, under the pool where the perches swam, and Glory down the well, and Glory up in the hills, and they answered when she spoke to them. All her dolls were kings and queens, and she had a gift for making up in strange and grand disguises. It was almost as if her actress grandmother had bestowed on her from her birth the right to life and luxury and love.
She was a born mimic, and could hit off to a hair an eccentricity or an affectation. The frown of Aunt Anna, who was severe, the smile of Aunt Rachel, who was sentimental, and the yawn of Cornelius Kewley, the clerk who was always sleepy, lived again in the roguish, rippling face. She remembered some of her mother's French songs, and seeing a street-singer one day, she established herself in the market-place in that character, with grown people on their knees around her, ready to fall on her and kiss her and call her Phonodoree, the fairy. But she did not forget to go round for the ha'pennies either.
At ten she was a tomboy, and marched through the town at the head of an army of boys, playing on a comb between her teeth and flying the vicar's handkerchief at the end of his walking-stick. In these days she climbed trees and robbed orchards (generally her own) and imitated boys' voices, and thought it tyranny that she might not wear trousers. But she wore a sailor's blue stocking-cap, and it brightened existence when, for economy's sake and for the sake of general tidiness, she was allowed to wear a white woollen jersey. Then somebody who had a dinghy that he did not want asked her if she would like to have a boat. Would she like to have paradise, or pastry cakes, or anything that was heavenly! After that she wore a sailor's jacket and a sou'wester when she was on the sea, and tumbled about the water like a duck.
At twelve she fell in love--with love. It was a vague passion interwoven with dreams of grandeur. The parson being too poor to send her to the girls' college at Douglas, and his daughters being too proud to send her to the dame's school at Peel, she was taught at home by Aunt Rachel, who read the poetry of Thomas Moore, knew the birthdays of all the royal family, and was otherwise meekly romantic. From this source she gathered much curious sentiment relating to some visionary world where young girls were held aloft in the sunshine of luxury and love and happiness. One day she was lying on her back on the heather of the Peel hill, with her head on her arms, thinking