Joan was thankful when lunch was over, and murmured "Amen" to grace with a fervor that would have surprised an unimaginative and unobservant person.Like all the meals in that pompous dining-room, it was a form of torture to a young thing bubbling with health and high spirits, who was not supposed to speak unless directly addressed and was obliged to hold herself in check while her grandparents progressed slowly and deliberately through a menu of medically thought-out dishes.Both the old people were on a rigid diet, and mostly the conversation between them consisted of grumbles at having to dally with baby-food and reminiscences of the admirable dinners of the past.An aged butler and a footman in the sere and yellow only added to the general Rip van Winklism, and the presence of two very old dogs, one the grandfather's Airedale and the other Mrs.Ludlow's Irish terrier, with a white nose and rusty gray coat, did nothing to dispel the depression.The six full-length portraits in oils that hung on the walls represented men and women whose years, if added together, would have made a staggering grand total.
Even the furniture was Colonial.
But when Joan had put on her hat, sweater and a pair of thick-soled country boots, and having taken care to see that no one was about, slid down the banisters into the hall on her way out for her usual lonely walk, she slipped into the garden with a queer sense of excitement, an odd and unaccountable premonition that something was going to happen.This queer thing had come to her in the middle of lunch and had made her heart suddenly begin to race.If she had been given to self analysis, which she was not, she might have told herself that she had received a wireless message from some one as lonely as herself, who had sent out the S.O.S.call in the hope of its being picked up and answered.As it was, it stirred her blood and made her restless and intensely eager to get into the open, to feel the sun and smell the sweetness in the air and listen to the cheery note of the birds.
It was with something of the excited interest which must have stirred Robinson Crusoe on seeing the foot-prints on the sand of what he had conceived to be a desert island that she ran up the hill, through the awakened woods whose thick carpet of brown leaves was alight with the green heads of young ferns, and out to the clearing from which she had so often gazed wist fully in the direction of the great city away in the distance.
She was surprised to find that she was alone as usual, bitterly disappointed to see no other sign of life than her friends the rabbits and the squirrels--the latter of which ambled toward her in the expectation of peanuts.She had no sort of concrete idea of what she had expected to find: nor had she any kind of explanation of the wave of sympathy that had come to her as clearly as though it had been sent over an electric wire.All she knew was that she was out of breath for no apparent reason, and on the verge of tears at seeing no one there to meet her.Once before, on her sixth birth day, the same call had been sent to her when she was playing alone with her dolls in the semitropical garden of a hired house in Florida, and she had started up and toddled round to the front and found a large-eyed little girl peering through the gate.It was the beginning of a close and blessed friendship.
This time, it seemed, the call had been meant for some other lonely soul, and so she stood and looked with blurred eyes over the wide valley that lay unrolled at her feet and, asked herself what she had ever done to deserve to be left out of all the joy of life.From somewhere near by the baying of hounds came, and from a farm to her left the crowing of a cock; and then a twig snapped behind her, and she turned eagerly.
"Oh, hello," said the boy.
"Oh, hello," she said.
He was not the hero of her dreams, by a long way.His hair didn't curl; his nose was not particularly straight; nor were his eyes large and magnetic.He was not something over six feet two; nor was he dressed in wonderful clothes into which he might have been poured in liquid form.He was a cheery, square-shouldered, good-natured looking fellow with laughter in his gray eyes and a little quizzical smile playing round a good firm mouth.He looked like a man who ought to have been in the navy and who, instead, gave the impression of having been born among horses.His small, dark head was bare; his skin had already caught the sun, and as he stood in his brown sweater with his hands thrust into the pockets of his riding breeches, he seemed to her to be just exactly like the brother that she ought to have had if she had had any luck at all, and she held out a friendly hand with a comfortable feeling of absolute security.
With some self-consciousness he took it and bowed with a nice touch of deference.He tried to hide the catch in his breath and the admiration in his eyes."I'm glad it's spring," he said, not knowing quite what he was saying.
"So am I," said Joan."Just look at those violets and the way the leaves are bursting.""I know.Great, isn't it? Are you going anywhere?""No.I've nowhere to go."
"Same here.Let's go together."