The Seeker | Page 9

in a window of the big house next door. She was clad in a black velvet cloak and hood, with pink satin next her face inside the hood, and she carried a large closely-wrapped doll which she affected to think might have taken cold. With great self-possession she doffed her cloak and overshoes; then slowly and tenderly unwound the wrappings of the doll, talking meanwhile in low mothering tones, and going with it to the fire when she had it uncloaked. Of the boy who stared at her she seemed unconscious, and he could do no more than stand timidly at a little distance. An eye-flash from the maid may have perceived his abjectness, for she said haughtily at length, "I'm astonished no one in this house knows where Clytie is!"
He drew nearer by as far as he could slowly spread his feet twice.
"I know--now--she went to get two glasses from the dresser to take to my grandfather and that gentleman." He felt voluble from the mere ease of the answer. But she affected to have heard nothing, and he was obliged to speak again.
"Now--why, I know a doll that shuts up her eyes every time she lies down."
The doll at hand was promptly extended on the little lap and with a click went into sudden sleep while the mother rocked it. He could have ventured nothing more after this pricking of his inflated little speech. A moment he stood, suffering moderately, and then would have edged cautiously away with the air of wishing to go, only at this point, without seeming to see him, she chirped to him quite winningly in a soft, warm little voice, and there was free talk at once. He manfully let her tell of all her silly little presents before talking of his own. He even listened about the doll, whose name Santa Claus had thoughtfully painted on the box in which she came; it was a French name, "Fragile."
Then, being come to names, they told their own. Hers, she said, was Lillian May.
"But your uncle, now--that gentleman--he called you Nancy when you came in." He waited for her solving of this.
"Oh, Uncle Doctor doesn't know it yet, what my real name is. They call me Nancy, but that's a very disagreeable name, so I took Lillian May for my real name. But I tell very few persons," she added, importantly. Here he was at home; he knew about choosing a good name.
"Did you give up the gold-piece you found?" he asked. But this puzzled her.
"'A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches,'" he reminded her. "Didn't you find a gold-piece like Ben Holt did?"
But it seemed she had never found anything. Indeed, once she had lost a dime, even on the way to spending it for five candy bananas and five jaw-breakers. Plainly she had chosen her good name without knowing of the case of Ben Holt. Then he promised to show her something the most wonderful in all the world, which she would never believe without seeing it, and led her to where the candy cane towered to their shoulders in its corner. He saw at once that it meant less to her than it did to him.
"Oh, it's a candy cane!" she said, calling it a candy cane commonly, with not even a hush of tone, as one would say "a brick house" or "a gold watch," or anything. She, promptly detecting his disappointment at her coldness, tried to simulate the fervour of an initiate, but this may never be done so as to deceive any one who has truly sensed the occult and incommunicable virtue of the candy cane. For one thing, she kept repeating the words "candy cane" baldly, whenever she could find a place for them in her soulless praise; whereas an initiate would not once have uttered the term, but would have looked in silence. Another initiate, equally silent by his side, would have known him to be of the brotherhood. Perhaps at the end there would have been respectful wonder expressed as to how long it would stay unbroken and so untasted. Still he was not unkind to her, except in ways requisite to a mere decent showing forth of his now ascertained superiority. He helped her to a canter on the new horse; and even pretended a polite and superficial interest in the doll, Fragile, which she took up often. Being a girl, she had to be humoured in that manner. But any boy could see that the thing went to sleep by turning its eyes inside out, and its garters were painted on its fat legs. These things he was, of course, too much the gentleman to point out.
When the Doctor and his host came down stairs late in the afternoon,