Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/211

 book or a game. If he had been another sort of boy he might have tired of it. But he was naturally gentle and affectionate and "sorry for the kid" (as he expressed it to me) and sufficiently out of tune with his surroundings to enjoy his escape into a hidden friendship with a girl like Flora Furness, and he was not proud enough to resent the fact that she could not know him publicly. He Jiad in him a Celtic strain of poetry and imagination that kept him as secretive about her as if she were one of those invisible playmates that solitary children invent. She never asked him to come. She never reproached him if he were late or hurried. But she was always waiting for him, and she glowed with a touching pleasure, repressed, but flatteringly sincere, when he arrived; and she played his make-believe games with him, fascinated by an inventiveness that was beyond her. She was probably rather stupid as a child in everything but the depth of her feeling.

Apparently he did not realize how far matters had gone with him until she was sent away to a girls' school where she could not receive letters or write to him without it being known. He mooned around in a state of desperate loneliness for a long time before he returned to his proper associates. It was during this absence of hers that he took the Gorman attic room as his bedroom and study, with some boyish idea of being nearer the memory of her. He put the high head of his bed against