the eyes had a strained, far away look, as if he were trying to grasp the real happiness that had come to him after the long wait, and could not. He was slower than ever of speech.
That look went straight to Sally's heart—it told so eloquently of the loneliness and despair of the past year. So she strove to cheer him, her laughter and raillery rippling lightheartedly under the waving palms, and by the waters of the spring, until the little "gab-birds," the brilliant parokeets with their Joseph's coats of many colours, jabbered harshly to each other, asking what it was all about.
"So I let Stell' get in the machine—she has a crush on Phil, you know—and she rode off proud as that chesty peacock on his lawn. And Ben, I'd bet a box of Huylers to a five cent bag of Comby's horehound drops, she let him kiss her when they got to that stretch of road in the pines— But there, that's mean. Stell's all right."
Yes there had been a plump, good-natured girl, always flirting with the boys, and there were such things as Comby's horehound drops, and Huyler's bonbons, and high-powered machines called automobiles. And however phantasmagorical their existence seemed in this green island paradise, there surely was, sitting before him, cross-legged on a bed of crumbled fern, a girl with black hair, with the sea's own wave in it, and a middy blouse and a scarlet tie—and in her dancing eyes gleams like the wave-crests, or phosphor flashes on the midnight sea—and in them, too, a look of love for him. And on that whimsical girlish mouth there flashed, in and out between her banterings, a look of sympathy and tenderness that was meant for him alone.
