Page:Anne's house of dreams (1920 Canada).djvu/135

 “Now, now, you hadn’t oughter be roaming about alone on a night like this. You could get lost in this fog easier than not. Jest you wait till I see Dick safe inside the door and I’ll come back and light you over the fields. I ain’t going to have Dr. Blythe coming home and finding that you walked clean over Cape Leforce in the fog. A woman did that once, forty years ago.

“So you’ve been over to see Leslie,” he said, when he rejoined her.

“I didn’t go in,” said Anne, and told what she had seen. Captain Jim sighed.

“Poor, poor, little girl! She don’t cry often, Mistress Blythe—she’s too brave for that. She must feel terrible when she does cry. A night like this is hard on poor women who have sorrows. There’s something about it that kinder brings up all we’ve suffered—or feared.”

“It’s full of ghosts,” said Anne, with a shiver. “That was why I came over—I wanted to clasp a human hand and hear a human voice.

There seem to be so many inhuman presences about tonight. Even my own dear house was full of them. They fairly elbowed me out. So I fled over here for companionship of my kind.”

“You were right not to go in, though, Mistress Blythe. Leslie wouldn’t have liked it. She wouldn’t have liked me going in with Dick, as I’d have done if I hadn’t met you. I had Dick down