Page:Son of the wind.djvu/272

RV 254 a faint expression of anxiety. The old wing was Mr. Rader—not classic enough, but elderly, individual, unexpected, and having the courage of its convictions. There was nothing like Blanche, unless it were the pale, cool light and hot pools of sun in the pine forest. But she was not only the near light and shade, in which a man could rest and be stimulated. by the sharp, uncloying sweetness. She was also the inexhaustible blue arch of the sky.

Whistling between his teeth, the cold pipe held fast in them, his upper mind occupied, it occurred to his baser perceptions that the pine-needles had drifted a good deal in the last week. He hunted out a rake from the tool house and set himself to work, raking back the brown drift to the edges of the clearing, and then into separate little cocks with a good collar of bare earth around each. He remembered how, with the autumn, little pyres like these had been set blazing down the Greenwich streets; how the boys had leaped them, and the girls, in greater danger because of skirts. The thought floated in his mind of how Blanche would have leaped, with no fear of the fire, with only the fear of not leaping highest and best. He could see how she would look, a child with rough, streaming curls, and the light of competition in her eye. She would have permitted no boy but himself to be her better!