By the Light of the Soul: A NovelFreeman, Mary Eleanor Wilkins
General
By the Light of the Soul: A Novel
Freeman, Mary Eleanor Wilkins
Fiction
to weep that she wept. No other reason seemed in the least necessary
to her. In front of where she sat was a large patch of sunlight
overspreading a low growth of fuzzy weeds, which shone like silver,
and a bent thicket of dry asters which were still blue although
withered.
All at once Evelyn became aware that this patch of sunlight was
darkened, and she looked up in a sweet confusion. Her big, dark eyes
were not in the least reddened by her tears; they only glittered with
them. Her lips, slightly swollen, only made her lovelier.
Directly before her stood the new principal, and he was gazing down
at her with a sort of consternation, pity, and embarrassment.
Wollaston was in reality wishing himself anywhere else. A woman's
tears aroused in him pity and irritation. He wished to pass on, but
it seemed too impossible to do so and leave this lovely young
creature in such distress without a word of inquiry. He therefore
paused, and his slightly cold, blue eyes met Evelyn's brilliant,
tearful ones with interrogation.
"Is there anything I can do for you?" he asked. "Shall I call any
one? Are you ill?"
Evelyn felt hurt and disturbed by his look and tone. New tears welled
up in her eyes. She shook her head with a slight pout. Wollaston
passed on. Evelyn raised her head and gazed after him with an
indescribable motion, the motion of a timid, wild thing of the woods,
which pursues, but whose true instinct is to be pursued. Suddenly she
rose, and ran after him, and was by his side.
"I am ashamed you should have seen--" she said, brokenly. "I was
crying for nothing."
Wollaston looked down at her and smiled. She also was smiling through
her tears. "Young ladies should not cry for nothing," he said, with a
whimsical, school-master manner.
"It seems to me that nothing is the most terrible thing in the whole
world to cry for," replied Evelyn, with unconscious wisdom, but she
still smiled. Again her eyes met the young man's, and her innocently
admiring gaze was full upon his, and that happened which was
inevitable, one of the chain of sequences of life itself. His own
eyes responded ardently, and the girl's eyes fell before the man's.
At the same time there was no ulterior significance in the man's
look, which was merely in evidence of a passing emotion to which he
was involuntarily subject. He had not the slightest thought of any
love, which his look seemed to express for this little beauty of a
girl, whose name he did not even know. But he slackened his pace, and
Evelyn walked timidly beside him over the golden net-work of sunlight
in the path. Evelyn spoke first.
"You came from Edgham, Mr. Lee," she said.
Wollaston looked at her. "Yes. Do you know anybody there?"
Evelyn laughed. "I came from there myself," she said, "and so did my
sister, Maria. Maria is one of the teachers, you know."
Evelyn wondered why Mr. Lee's face changed, not so much color but
expression.
"Oh, you are Miss Edgham's sister?" he exclaimed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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