him the keenest
delight and, in another and baffling phase, a poignancy on which, as she
had grown to womanhood, it had seemed impious to allow her imagination
to play. She watched him now with the pity that was woven into her love
for him: his tall figure and the slightly stooped shoulders; the round
felt hat that crowned his thick, close-cut hair, the dejection that
seemed expressed in so many trifles at such moments,--as in his manner
of dropping his hands loosely into the pockets of his corduroy coat, and
standing immovable. Without taking his eyes from the fire he sat down
presently on a log and she saw him fumbling for his pipe and tobacco. He
bent to thrust a chip into the fire with the deliberation that marked
his movements in these moods. Now and then he took the pipe from his
mouth, and she knew the look that had come into his gray eyes, though
she saw only the profile of his bearded face as the firelight limned it.

Now, as at other such times, on summer evenings in the little garden at
home, or on winter nights before the fire in their sitting-room, she
felt that he should be left to himself; that his spirit traversed realms
beyond boundaries she might not cross; and that in a little while his
reverie would end and he would rise and fling up his long arms and ask
whether it was breakfast-time or time to go to bed.

Phil Kirkwood was eighteen, a slim, brown, graceful creature, with a
habit of carrying her chin a little high; a young person who seemed to
be enjoying flights into the realm of reverie at times, and then, before
you were aware of it, was off, away out of sight and difficult to catch
with hand or eye. As a child this abruptness had been amusing; now that
she was eighteen her aunts had begun to be distressed by it. Her critics
were driven to wild things for comparisons. She was as quick as a
swallow; and yet a conscientious ornithologist would have likened her in
her moments of contemplation to the thrush for demureness. And a robin
hopping across a meadow, alert in all his mysterious senses, was not
more alive than Phil in action. Her middle-aged aunts said she was
impudent, but this did not mean impudent speech; it was Phil's silences
that annoyed her aunts and sometimes embarrassed or dismayed other
people. Her brown eye could be very steady and wholly respectful when,
at the same time, there was a suspicious twitching of her
thread-of-scarlet lips. The aunts were often outraged by her conduct.