Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/25

 discovered a quaint little piano, with but two or three octaves of notes, and most of those silent, save for a tawngling of wires. This I thought must be Prudence Carroll's spinet, for it looked exactly like the one in her portrait; indeed, that had been my principal reason for bringing it downstairs. With Prudence Carroll I had been in love all my life, and sometimes, in the dusk, when I struck very softly one of the cracked treble notes of the spinet, I would imagine her spirit stealing on tip-toe up behind me to listen. Another discovery, and perhaps the most exciting, was of an old davenport, with a secret drawer at the back of it—not so very secret, perhaps, since I had found it without looking for it, owing to the weakness of the spring, and my own energetic dusting. Inside was nothing more interesting than some old accounts, written on discoloured paper, but anybody who opened it to-day would, I fancy, find more appropriate documents

There was a cushioned window-seat, low and deep, and from it I could look out over the sea. In summer, with the window wide open, I could listen to it also, and to all kinds of lovely songs coming through it, dreamy and happy and sad. For there was a sort of undercurrent of dreaming that ran through my life. The romance surrounding the picture of Prudence Carroll, that peculiar, brooding quality of mind by which I could give to such things a kind of spiritual life that had for me an absolute reality, was, perhaps, only too characteristic of a mental condition which might unsympathetically be called that of perpetual wool-gathering. Though I played cricket and football, and bathed and knocked about generally with the other boys in the village, I had no close friends, and I dreamed of an imaginary playmate. For this playmate and myself I invented appropriate adventures. He had a name, which I shall not write here, and I still think he was an extraordinarily nice boy, but he dropped out of my existence about