“I’m going to tell the boys and girls at school that I’m not ugly after all.”  She spoke with no trace of vanity, merely with a frankness which had yet to learn the arts of coyness.

“No,” counseled her new adviser, “don’t do anything of the sort.  Simply wait and after awhile everyone will be telling you.”

“But nobody ever told me before that having eyes that didn’t match was pretty,” she argued.

“Some day, if you happen to live where men make fine phrases, which after all may not be such a blessing,” he assured her, “they will whisper to you that you are a miraculous color-scheme.  It’s a bit hard to express, but I can give you examples—­” He broke off suddenly and laughed at himself.  “After all,” he began again in a different voice, “what’s the use?  I forgot that the things I should compare you with are all things you haven’t seen.  They would mean nothing.”

“Tell me, anyhow,” she commanded.

“Very well.  There is a style of architecture in the Orient:  The Temple of Omar at Jerusalem has it.  The Taj Mahal has it.  Interiors crusted with the color of gems and mosaics and rich inlay; the Italian renaissance has it; splashed from a palette that knew no stint—­no economy.  It’s a brilliant, triumphant sort of paean in which the notes are all notes of color.  You have it, too—­and now I’m going to drive on.  But don’t forget that it’s easier to be kind when people call you spindle-legs than it will be when they come with offerings of flattery.”

“You must have seen a lot of things.”  Mary Burton’s voice was that of admiring wonder, and the young man’s face became grave, almost pained for an instant.

“In a way,” he answered, “I have.  But I may not see much more.  Most men look back on life when they are old and wise, but I am doing it while still young and perhaps the backward glance is the same in age or youth.  It’s a summary.”

“I don’t understand half of what you are saying,” she confessed a little regretfully.  It seemed to her from what she did grasp that the rest would be well worth while.

“If it were otherwise,” he laughed with a return of the whimsical glint to his pupils and the little wrinkles about the corners of his eyes, “I should not have said half of it.  A good part of my conversation has been in the manner of soliloquy.  Hermits often talk to themselves.  I shall now say something else you won’t understand.  Wield leniently the dangerous gift of your witchcraft—­the freakish beauty of your perfect unmatched eyes.”

And all the way home Mary Burton walked on air, and the lonely woods seemed to have grown of a sudden spicy and glorious.  When she stole up to the room under the eaves and looked again into the little mirror, she did not turn away so unhappy as she had been.  The brown eye dared to meet the brown eye in the glass—­and the violet eye, the violet.

Under her breath she repeated over and over, lest she forget some of its polysyllables, a sentence which was half-incomprehensible to her, yet which was sonorous enough and grandiloquent enough to impress her deeply.  At last, also lest memory prove illusive, she wrote the sentence down:  “Wield leniently the dangerous gift of your witchcraft—­the freakish beauty of your perfect unmatched eyes.”