"Now, then!" he said, keeping his eyes on his breezy little guest.
"What have you got to tell me--before you go?"
"It's something that happened--long ago. You will not laugh if I tell
you? You laugh right much."
"I? You think I laugh a good deal? Good Lord! Some folk think I don't
laugh enough." He had his friends back home in mind, and somehow the
memory steadied him for an instant.
"P'r'aps they-all don't know you as well as I do." This with amusing
conviction.
"Perhaps they don't." Truedale was deadly solemn. "But go on,
Nella-Rose. I promise not to laugh now."
"It was the beginning of--you!" The girl turned her eyes to the
fire--she was quaintly demure. "At first when I saw you looking in that
window, yonder, I was right scared."
Jim White's statement that Nella-Rose wasn't more than half real seemed,
in the light of present happenings, little less than bald fact.
"It was the way _you_ looked--way back there when I was ten years old. I
had run away--"
"Are you always running away?" asked Truedale from the hollow depths of
unreality.
"I run away a smart lot. You have to if you want to--see things and be
different."
"And you--you want to be different, Nella-Rose?"
"I--why, can't you see?--I _am_ different."
"Of course. I only meant--do you like to be different."
"I have to like it. I was born with a cawl.
Pages:
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32