He was a harp; all life that he had known and that was his consciousness was the strings; and the flood of music was a wind that poured against those strings and set them vibrating with memories and dreams.  He did not merely feel.  Sensation invested itself in form and color and radiance, and what his imagination dared, it objectified in some sublimated and magic way.  Past, present, and future mingled; and he went on oscillating across the broad, warm world, through high adventure and noble deeds to Her—­ay, and with her, winning her, his arm about her, and carrying her on in flight through the empery of his mind.

And she, glancing at him across her shoulder, saw something of all this in his face.  It was a transfigured face, with great shining eyes that gazed beyond the veil of sound and saw behind it the leap and pulse of life and the gigantic phantoms of the spirit.  She was startled.  The raw, stumbling lout was gone.  The ill-fitting clothes, battered hands, and sunburned face remained; but these seemed the prison-bars through which she saw a great soul looking forth, inarticulate and dumb because of those feeble lips that would not give it speech.  Only for a flashing moment did she see this, then she saw the lout returned, and she laughed at the whim of her fancy.  But the impression of that fleeting glimpse lingered, and when the time came for him to beat a stumbling retreat and go, she lent him the volume of Swinburne, and another of Browning—­she was studying Browning in one of her English courses.  He seemed such a boy, as he stood blushing and stammering his thanks, that a wave of pity, maternal in its prompting, welled up in her.  She did not remember the lout, nor the imprisoned soul, nor the man who had stared at her in all masculineness and delighted and frightened her.  She saw before her only a boy, who was shaking her hand with a hand so calloused that it felt like a nutmeg-grater and rasped her skin, and who was saying jerkily:-

“The greatest time of my life.  You see, I ain’t used to things. . . " He looked about him helplessly.  “To people and houses like this.  It’s all new to me, and I like it.”

“I hope you’ll call again,” she said, as he was saying good night to her brothers.

He pulled on his cap, lurched desperately through the doorway, and was gone.

“Well, what do you think of him?” Arthur demanded.

“He is most interesting, a whiff of ozone,” she answered.  “How old is he?”

“Twenty—­almost twenty-one.  I asked him this afternoon.  I didn’t think he was that young.”

And I am three years older, was the thought in her mind as she kissed her brothers goodnight.

CHAPTER III