Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/117

 He was all joints and knuckles, ashamed and flushing easily.

But from the first day when he saw Leander's curly yellow head before him in the chapel, he felt drawn toward the boy. The sight of Leander was like a ray of sunlight piercing the gloomy depths of his soul, illuminating and warming it as no man or woman save his mother had ever been able to do. And Leander was, too, a sort of an ideal, a symbol of all that which Uriah might have been save for his age, his uncouthness and the scar upon his soul. Leander seemed in truth the chosen of God—comely, confident, young and, in a community made harsh by fear of a terrible God, a creature bright with charm. On the day he first spoke to Uriah, the older man felt the skies open and saw the sun pour through.

In Leander the first impulse to speak arose from a sense of pity for Uriah, who even in that queer community seemed strange and awkward and out of place. It was Uriah's loneliness that touched him, almost without his knowing it.

From that moment onward the older man came to look for the boy's greeting as one who lives in a dour climate looks for the sun. He plotted, without plotting, that he might encounter Leander during the day. To Annie, waiting for him at home, he seemed to grow more cheerful and talkative. She wondered at the reason, but she never asked him and Uriah could not have told her why the world seemed a better place, less black with sin.

As for Annie, she cooked and baked, and in order to help Uriah with money she began to do sewing