Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/461

 sympathy for Mrs. Jones, when he makes them all stand around at an Alpine railway station while he delightedly figures out and explains how the funicular works."

There were times when she ran on, mirthful, flashing, keen, droll, amusing herself and making him laugh as nothing had ever made him laugh before, out of sheer, light-hearted hilarity. As he watched her, talking animatedly in her beautiful, clearly articulated English, her plastic face a comic mask, fooling and bantering till she had him shouting, and yet with that core of shrewd observation and real intelligence underlying all she said, sometimes he remembered with a start his first sight of her up there on the roof—what was the meaning of that unearthly sadness the moon had shown him?

She was not, it is true, by any means always gay on these stolen talks together. She could be stern and brief, as when he asked her challengingly, one day, "Well, you've been in Europe all your life, nearly. What have you got out of it?" She answered, "To work hard and not to expect much from anything—except from music."

Her face that was sometimes as meltingly soft as a Correggio girl-saint, looked dark and set. He had been so disconcerted by her look and accent, that like the lump he was, he had found nothing to say before she hailed her tram-car and left him.

Often she made him talk, talk as he had never dreamed of talking to any one, leading him on to flight of wordy self-expression, such as he blushed afterwards to remember, sure that he must have bored and wearied her. And yet there never was such a listener as she, attentive, silent, except for just the occasional comment that launched him off on further talk, when his self-consciousness coming warningly forward bade him stop before he seemed a solemn ass. She made him intensely desire to share with her everything that was in his mind. Helpless before the compelling personal look with which she listened to him, he poured it all out pell-mell, what he had been struggling to lay hold of, ever since he had left Hoosick Junction.

"One of the things that keeps coming over me, is the