Page:The Inner House.djvu/47

Rh and shipwreck and rescue; and at hearing it some of them looked puzzled and some pained; but the sailor listened with all his ears.

"Where did you get that from, Christine?"

"Where I get everything—from the old Library. Come and read it in the book. Jack."

"I am not much hand at reading. But some day, perhaps after next voyage, Christine."

The girl poured out a glass of claret for the old man. Then she went on telling them stories; but most of her neighbors seemed neither to hear nor to comprehend. Only the sailor-man listened and nodded. Then she laughed out loud.

At this sound, so strange, so unexpected, everybody within hearing jumped. Her table was in the Hall next to our own, so that we heard the laugh quite plainly.

The Arch Physician looked round approvingly.

"How many years since we heard a good, honest young laugh. Suffragan? Give us more children, and soften our hearts for us. But, no; the heart you want is the hard, crusted, selfish heart. See! No one asks why she laughed. They are all eating again now, just as if nothing had happened. Happy, enviable People!"

Presently he turned to me and remarked, in his lofty manner, as if he was above all the world,

"You cannot explain, Suffragan, why, at an unexpected touch, a sound, a voice, a trifle, the memory may be suddenly awakened to things long, long past and forgotten. Do you know what that laugh caused me to remember? I cannot explain why, nor can you. It recalled the evening of the Great Discovery—not the Discovery itself, but quite another thing. I went there more to meet a girl than to hear what the German had to say. As to that I expected very little. To meet that girl