Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/181

 at Wauchock, but I don't think you ever noticed me. And then we moved to Centerbrook, and I didn't see you again till you came to school there. I'm Ruth Young."

He did not remember ever having heard the name before. "It doesn't matter," he said.

He was gazing at her in a way that he had never looked at any one in his life before. During all those years of silence and solitariness at Wauchock, at Centerbrook, in New York, he had never spoken to any one as he was speaking to her or found any one who could meet his eyes in complete and friendly sincerity as she met them. And the strange thing was that now it seemed as if she had shared in all those years as an invisible companion, who had suddenly appeared to him, who was sitting beside him and smiling at him as she had in some way been watching him and smiling at him, unseen, always, even from his boyhood.

Perhaps it was the thought of what had kept him solitary that made him ask, "Did you know about my father?"

And it was certainly the tone in which he asked it that made her, for the first time, glance away from him as she replied: "Yes. There was a lot of gossip about it."

He said, "I'm glad."

She understood; he was glad that there was not even this secret concealed from her; that she knew it and was not ashamed of him. She put out her