Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/57

 a pair of scissors—though later in the summer, it must be confessed, a friendly groom at the livery-stable put this crude method to shame by brief yet transforming applications of the horse-clippers.

From under Lonely's bushy little russet eyebrows looked out a pair of eyes which had no right to be there; for they were, in truth, the eyes of a woman,—unfathomable, lustrous, quick-changing, restlessly meditative eyes,—the sort of eyes, for all the nervous squint that often came into them, that made tender-hearted women vaguely wish, when they chanced to catch sight of Lonely in a moment of fleeting and innocent repose, that they might some day be his Sunday-school teacher and talk to him about his soul. They were eyes that made the hearts of more elderly maiden ladies, when not indignantly driving their predaceous owner out of a strawberry patch, wish just as incongruously that they could some day be a mother to Lonely, and at the same time speculate as to how nice he would be with a well-washed face, or in a clean and respectably starched roundabout.

If, alas! those undiscerning and deluded