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Place Beyond The Winds

<h2>CHAPTER XVIII</h2> The following June Priscilla Glenn graduated. She and John Boswell grew quite merry over the event. "I really can't let you spend anything on me," she said laughingly; "nothing more than the cost of a few flowers. I have the awful weight of debt upon me at the beginning of my career. One hundred dollars to Master Farwell, and——" "The funeral expenses of that poor waif you were so interested in! My dear child, you are as niggardly with your philanthropies as you are with your favours. Why not be generous with me? And, by the way, can you tell me just why that young fellow appealed to you so? I daresay other 'unknowns' drift into St. Albans." "He looked—you will think me foolish, Mr. Boswell—but he looked like some one I once knew in Kenmore." The warm June day drifted sunnily into Boswell's study window. There was a fragrance of flowers and the note of birds. Priscilla, in her plain white linen dress, was sitting on the broad window seat, and Boswell, from his winged chair, looked at her with a tightening of the throat. There were times when she made him feel as he felt when Farwell Maxwell used to look at him before the shadow fell between them—the shadow that darkened both their lives. "And that was why you had a—a Kenmore name graven on the stone?" "Yes, Mr. Boswell, Jerry-Jo McAlpin. Jerry-Jo is dead, too, you know. They name living people after dead ones. Why not dead people?" "Why, indeed? It's quite an idea. Quite an original idea. But as to my spending money on your graduation, a little more added to what you already owe me will not count, and, besides, there is that trifle left from Farwell's loan still to your credit." "Now, Mr. Boswell, don't press me too close! I was a sad innocent when I came from the In-Place, and a joke is a joke, but you mustn't bank on it." The bright head nodded cheerfully at the small, crumpled figure in the deep chair. "After you live in New York three years, Mr. Boswell, you never mistake a shilling for a dollar, sir. But just because it is such a heavenly day—and between you and me, how much of that magic fund is left?" "I've mislaid my account," Boswell replied, the look that Toky watched for stealing over his thin face; "but, roughly speaking, I should say that, with the interest added, about fifty dollars, perhaps a trifle more." Priscilla threw back her head and laughed merrily. "I can understand why people say your style is so absorbing," she said presently; "you make even the absurd seem probable." "Who have you heard comment on my style?" Boswell leaned forward. He was as sensitive as a child about his work. "Oh, one of the doctors at St. Albans told me that, to him, you were the Hans Christian Andersen of grown-ups. He always reads you after a long strain." A flush touched the sallow cheeks, and the long, white fingers tapped the chair arms nervously. "Well!" with a satisfied laugh, "I can prove the amount to your credit in this case without resorting to my style. Would you mind going into your old room and looking at the box that you will find on the couch?" Priscilla ran lightly from the study, her eyes and cheeks telling the story of her delight. The box was uncovered. Some sympathetic hand, as fine as a woman's, had bared the secret for her. No mother could possibly have thought out detail and perfection more minutely. There it lay, the gift of a generous man to a lonely girl, everything for her graduating night! The filmy gown with its touch of colour in embroidered thistle flowers; the slippers and gloves; even the lace scarf, cloud-like and alluring; the long gloves and silken hose. Down beside the couch Priscilla knelt and pressed her head against the sacred gift. She did not cry nor laugh, but the rapt look that used to mark her hours before the shrine in Kenmore grew and grew upon her face. "You will accept? You think I did well in my—shopping?" Boswell stood in the doorway, just where a long path of late June sunlight struck across the room. For the girl, looking mutely at him with shining eyes, he was transfigured, translated. Only the great, tender soul was visible to her; the unasking, the kind spirit. Moved by a sudden impulse, Priscilla rose to her feet and walked to him with outstretched hands; when she reached him he took her hands in his and smiled up at her. "I—I accept," she whispered with a break in her voice. "You have made me—happier than I have ever been in my life!" Boswell drew her hands to his lips and kissed them. "And you will come and see me in them"—Priscilla turned her eyes to the box—"when I—dance?" "You are to dance?" "We are all to dance." "I have not seen you dance for many a day. If you dance as you once did there will be only you dancing. Yes, I will come." And Boswell went. The exercises were held in the little chapel. From his far corner he watched the young women, in uniforms of spotless white, file to the platform for their diplomas. They all merged, for him, into one—a tall, lithe creature with burnished hair, coppery and fine, and an exalted face. Later, from behind the mass of palms and ferns in the dancing hall, he saw only one girl—a girl in white with the tints of the thistle flower matching the deep eyes. And Priscilla danced. Some one, a young doctor, asked her, and fortunately for him he was a master hand at following. After a moment of surprise, tinged with excited determination, he found himself, with his brilliant partner, the centre of attraction. "Look! oh, do look at the little Canuck!" cried a classmate. "I never saw any one dance as she does"—it was Doctor Travers who spoke from the doorway beside Mrs. Thomas—"but once before. It's quite primeval, an instinct. No one can teach or acquire such grace as that." Then, suddenly, and apropos of nothing, apparently: "By the way, Mrs. Thomas, Miss Moffatt has been ordered abroad by Doctor Ledyard. He spoke to-day about securing a companion-nurse for her. She's not really ill, but in rather a curious nervous condition. I was wondering if——" His eyes followed Priscilla, who was nearing the cluster of palms behind which Boswell sat. "Of course!" Mrs. Thomas smiled broadly; "Miss Glynn, of course! She's made to order. The girl has her way to make. She's been rather overdoing lately. I don't like the look in her eyes at times. She never asks for sympathy or consideration, you understand, but she makes every woman, and man, too, judging by that rich cripple, Mr. Boswell, yearn over her. She'd be the merriest soul on earth, with half a chance, and she's the most capable girl I have: ready for an emergency; never weary. Why, of course, Miss Glynn!" "I'll speak to Doctor Ledyard to-night," said Travers. Then, strangely enough, Travers realized that he was very tired. He excused himself, and, walking back through the dim city streets to the Ledyard home, he thought of Kenmore and the old lodge as he had not for years. "I believe I'll run up there this summer," he muttered half aloud. "I'll take mother and urge Doctor Ledyard to join us. I would like to see how far I've travelled from the In-Place in—why it's years and years! All the way from boyhood to manhood." But Ledyard changed the current of his desire. The older man was sitting in his library when Travers entered, and Helen Travers was in the deep window opening to the little garden space behind the house. Time had dealt so gently with Helen that now, in her thin white gown, she looked even younger than in the Kenmore days, when her dress had been more severe. "You're late," said Ledyard, looking keenly at him. "Very late," echoed Helen, smiling. "I had dinner here and am waiting to be escorted home." "She's refused my company. Where have you been, Dick?" "I had to give out the diplomas, you know, at St. Albans." "It's after eleven now, Dickie." Helen's gaze was full of gentle pride. "I stopped for an hour to see those little girls play." "The nurses?" Ledyard frowned. "Girls and nurses are not one and the same thing, to a doctor." "Oh, come, come, dear friend!" Helen Travers went close to the two who were dearest to her in the world. "Do not be unmerciful. Being a woman, I must stand up for my sex. Did they play prettily, Dick? I'm sure they did not look as dear as they do in their uniforms." "One did. She was—well, to put it concisely, she was a—dance!" "Umph! That ruddy-headed one, I bet!" Ledyard turned on another electric light. "See here, Dick, do you think that girl could go abroad with Gordon Moffatt's daughter? Moffatt spoke about her. She rather impressed him while he was in St. Albans. She stood up against him. He never forgets that sort; he swears at it, but he trusts it. The old housekeeper is going along to keep the party in order, but a trained hand ought to go, too. The Moffatt girl has the new microbe—Unrest. It's playing the devil with her nerves. She's got to be jogged into shape." "I think we could prevail upon Miss Glynn to go. She has her way to make. She's been rather——" Travers stopped short; he was quoting Mrs. Thomas too minutely. "Rather what, Dick?" Helen had her head against her boy's shoulder. "Hunting a job," he lied manfully. "Most of those girls are up against it once the training is over." "And Dick," Helen raised her eyes, "Doctor Ledyard and I were talking of a trip abroad this summer for—ourselves. Will you come? We want the off-the-track places. Little by-products, you know. I'm hungry for—well, for detachment; but with those I love." "Just the thing, little mother, just the thing!" The In-Place faded from sight. In its stead rose a lonely mountain peak that caught the first touch of day and held it longest. A little lake lay at its foot, and there was the old house where he and Helen had spent so much of the summer while he and she were abroad! "Where does Miss Moffatt intend to go?" asked Travers. "That's it. Her ideas at present are typical of her condition. 'Snip the cord that holds me,' she said to me to-day; 'beg father to give me a handful of blank checks and old Mousey'—that's what she calls the housekeeper—'buy a nice nurse for me in case I need one—a nice un-nurse-like nurse,' she stipulated—'and let me play around the world for a few months to see if I can find my real self hiding in some cranny; then I'll come back and be good!' The girl's a fool, but most girls are when they've been brought up as she has been. Moffatt is at his wits' end. Young Clyde Huntter is on the carpet just now. Think of that match! think of what it would mean to Moffatt! There are times when I regret the club and cliff-dwelling age where women are concerned." "Now, now, my dear friend, please remember my sex." Helen ran from Richard to Ledyard. "We're all fagged, and the June night is sultry. After all, girls, even women, should be allowed a mind of their own! Take me home, Dick, I'm deeply offended." She smiled and held out her hands. "If they were all as sane as you, Helen," Ledyard's glance softened. "You are exceptional." "Every woman is an exceptional something, good friend, if only an exceptional fool. I'm rather proud of Margaret Moffatt's determination to have her way, and that idea of finding herself in some cranny of the old world is simply beautiful. I wonder——" "What, Helen?" "I wonder if an old lady like me, a lady with hair turning frosty, might, by any possibility, find her real self left back there—oh! ages, ages before—well, before things happened which she never understood?" Ledyard's eyes grew moist, but he made no reply. It was three days later that Priscilla Glenn received a note from Margaret Moffatt, but she had already been prepared for it by Doctor Ledyard and Mrs. Thomas. "Since they think I need a nurse," the note ran, "will you call at eleven to-morrow and see if you consider me sufficiently damaged to require your care? From what father says, I am prepared to succumb to you at once. Both father and I like strong oppositions!" The June weather had turned chilly after the brief spell of heat, and when Priscilla was ushered into Margaret Moffatt's private library she found a bright cannel coal fire in the little grate, beside which sat a tall, handsome girl in house gown of creamy white. "And so you are—Miss Glynn?" As a professional accepts a non de plume, Priscilla had accepted her name. "Yes. And you are—Miss Moffatt?" "Please sit down—no, not way off there! Won't you take this chair beside me? I'm rather an uncanny person, I warn you. If I do not like to have you close to me now, we could never get on—across the water! What belongs to me, and what I ought to have, is mine from the first. Besides, I want you to know the worst of me—for your own sake. Would you mind taking off your hat? You have the most cheerful hair I ever saw." Priscilla laid her broad-brimmed hat aside and laughed lightly. She was as uncanny as Margaret Moffatt, but she could not have described the charm that drew her to the girl across the hearth. "I'm rather a hopelessly cheerful person," she said, settling herself comfortably; "it's probably my chief virtue—or shortcoming." "You know I am not a bit sick—bodily, Miss Glynn. It's positively ridiculous to have a nurse for me, but if I am to get my way with my father I must humour him. A dear old family servant is going with me. Father did want a private cook and guide, but we've compromised on—you! I do hope you'll undertake the contract. I'm not half bad when I have my way. Do you think, now that you have seen me for fifteen minutes, that you could—tolerate me; take the chance?" "I should be very glad to be with you." Priscilla beamed. "Your eyes are—blue, I declare! Miss Glynn, by all the laws of nature you should have eyes as dark as mine." "Yes; an old nurse back in my Canadian home used to say I was made of the odds and ends of all the children my mother had and lost." "What a quaint idea! I believe she was right, too. That will make you adaptable. Miss Glynn, let me tell you something, just enough to begin on, about myself—as a case. I'm tired to death of everything that has gone before; I do not fit in anywhere. I believe I'm quite a different person from what every one else believes; I've never had a chance to know myself; I've been interpreted by—by generations, traditions, and those who love me. I want to get far enough away to—get acquainted with myself, and then if I am what I hope I am, I will return like a happy queen and triumphantly enter my kingdom. If I am not worthy—well, we will not talk about that! Something, I may tell you some day, has suddenly awakened me. I'm rather blinded and deafened. I must have time. Can you bear with me?" Margaret Moffatt leaned forward in her chair. Priscilla saw that her large brown eyes were tear-filled; the strong, white, outstretched hands trembling. A wave of sympathy, understanding, and great liking overwhelmed Priscilla, and she rose suddenly and stood beside the girl. "I—think I was meant—to help you," she said so simply that she could not be misunderstood. "When do we—go?" "Go? Oh! you mean on the hunt for myself?" "Yes." "Father has the refusal of staterooms on two steamers. Could you start in—a week? Or shall we say three weeks?" "It will not take me a day to get ready. My uniforms——" "Please, Miss Glynn, leave them behind. I'm sure you're just a nice girl besides being a splendid nurse. I want the nice girl with me." "Very well. That may take two days longer." "We'll sail, then, in a week. And will you—will you—will you accept something in advance, since time is so short?" "Something——?" "Yes. Your—your salary, you know." "Oh, you mean money? I had forgot. I shall be glad to have some. I am very poor." Again the simple, frank dignity touched Margaret Moffatt with pleasurable liking. "It's to be a hundred and fifty dollars a month and all expenses paid, Miss Glynn." "A hundred and fifty? Oh! I cannot——" "Doctor Ledyard arranged it with my father. You see, they know what you are to undergo. I rather incline to the belief that they consider they are making quite a bargain. I hate to see you cover your hair. Somehow you seem to be dimming the sunshine. Good-bye until——" "Day after to-morrow." "I will send a check to St. Albans to-night, Miss Glynn." And she did. A check for two hundred dollars with a box of yellow roses—Sunrise roses they were called. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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