“It will be gone in the morning,” she whispered, patting his hand. “We
are three--and the child.”
“Three, and God bless you,” said Fleury. “Three and the little
Gleam----”
“The Gleam,” the woman repeated, holding the child closer. “I love
that.”
“We are three and we follow the Gleam.”
7
Fleury took the child. The Faraway Woman sat straight in her seat, so
that Bellair wondered at her strength. Her strength came to him. The
deeps of his listening were opened to her low voice. The story came
to them with all the colour and contour of her thought-pictures--a
richness from the unspoken words which cannot be given again:
“It’s about a little girl whom I will call Olga,” she said. “That is
really her name, and the story is the little girl’s truly. I shall only
tell part of it to-night, for it is long and I would only tell you the
happy part--to-night.
“Olga’s father and mother and the other children lived in a low house
by the open road that led to Hamilton. He raised sheep for a living on
the rolling pasture-lands near the Waikata river, a hundred miles south
of Auckland.... Yes, Olga was born in New Zealand--the youngest of a
houseful of sisters. They belong more to the latter part of the story
which I shall not tell to-night--just the happy part to-night.... The
first thing that Olga remembered as belonging to the Great Subject was
spoken by her father one evening when they were all together at their
supper of bread and milk:
“‘... One never knows. It is best not to turn away any stranger, not
even if he is shabby and ill-looking. I heard of a house where a
stranger was turned away. They were not bad people, but supper was
over, the things put aside, and the woman was very tired. The stranger
was taken in at the next house, and in the morning he seemed different
to them--not shabby or ill-looking at all, but rested and laughing,
with bright lights about his hair. Always afterward, that house was
blest, but the other house went on in its misery and labour. One never
knows. It is best not to turn any stranger away.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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