You Never Know Your Luck | Page 7

seemed familiar to him, while he had been greatly
engaged with a big business thing he had been planning for a long time,
with Jesse Bulrush in the background or foreground, as scout or rear-
guard or what you will:
"'Whereaway, whereaway goes the lad that once was mine? Hereaway,
I waited him, hereaway and oft--'"
she hummed with an exaggerated gaiety in her voice, for the song had
saddened her, she knew not why. At the words the flaming exhilaration
of the man's face vanished and his eyes took on a poignant, distant
look.
"That--oh, that!" he said, and with a little jerk of the head and a

clenching of the hand he moved towards the street.
"Your hat!" she called after him, and ran inside the house. An instant
later she gave it to him. Now his face was clear and his eyes smiled
kindly at her.
"'Whereaway, hereaway' is a wonderful song," he said. "We used to
sing it when I was a boy--and after, and after. It's an old song--old as
the hills. Well, thanks, Kitty Tynan. What a girl you are--to be so kind
to a fellow like--me!"
"Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!"--these were the very words she had
used about herself a little while before. The song--why did it make Mr.
Kerry take on such a queer look all at once when he heard it? Kitty
watched him striding down the street into the town.
Now a voice--a rich, quizzical, kindly voice-called out to her:
"Come, come, Miss Tynan, I want to be helped on with my coat," it
said.
Inside the house a fat, awkward man was struggling, or pretending to
struggle, into his coat.
"Roll into it, Mr. Rolypoly," she answered cheerily as she entered.
"Of course I'm not the star boarder--nothing for me!" he said in affected
protest.
"A little more to starboard and you'll get it on," she retorted with a glint
of her late father's raillery, and she gave the coat a twitch which put it
right on the ample shoulders.
"Bully! bully!" he cried. "I'll give you the tip for the Askatoon cup."
"I'm a Christian. I hate horse-racers and gamblers," she returned
mockingly.
"I'll turn Christian--I want to be loved," he bleated from the doorway.

"Roll on, proud porpoise!" she rejoined, which shows that her
conversation was not quite aristocratic at all times.
"Golly, but she's a gold dollar in a gold bank," remarked Jesse Bulrush
warmly as he lurched into the street.
The girl stood still in the middle of the room looking dreamily down
the way the two men had gone.
The quiet of the late summer day surrounded her. She heard the dizzy
din of the bees, the sleepy grinding of the grass hoppers, the sough of
the solitary pine at the door, and then behind them all a whizzing,
machine- like sound. This particular sound went on and on.
She opened the door of the next room. Her mother sat at a
sewing-machine intent upon some work, the needle eating up a
spreading piece of cloth.
"What are you making, mother?" Kitty asked. "New blinds for Mr.
Kerry's bedroom-he likes this green colour," the widow added with a
slight flush, due to leaning over the sewing-machine, no doubt.
"Everybody does everything for him," remarked the girl almost
pettishly.
"That's a nice spirit, I must say!" replied her mother reprovingly, the
machine almost stopping.
"If I said it in a different way it would be all right," the other returned
with a smile, and she repeated the words with a winning soft inflection,
like a born actress.
"Kitty-Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!" declared her mother, and she
bent smiling over the machine, which presently buzzed on its
devouring way. Three people had said the same thing within a few
minutes. A look of pleasure stole over the girl's face, and her bosom
rose and fell with a happy sigh. Somehow it was quite a wonderful day
for her.

CHAPTER II
CLOSING THE DOORS
There are many people who, in some subtle psychological way, are
very like their names; as though some one had whispered to "the
parents of this child" the name designed for it from the beginning of
time. So it was with Shiel Crozier. Does not the name suggest a man
lean and flat, sinewy, angular and isolated like a figure in one of El
Greco's pictures in the Prado at Madrid? Does not the name suggest a
figure of elongated humanity with a touch of ancient mysticism and yet
also of the fantastical humour of Don Quixote?
In outward appearance Shiel Crozier, otherwise J. G. Kerry, of
Askatoon, was like his name for the greater part of the time. Take him
in repose, and he looked a lank ascetic who