Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/231

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BARNEY LOUTRELLE
219

well as of the soldier. These were his now, a part of him to endure as long as he lived; yet now that he was again in America and the war was over, there returned to him the sensations of the boy of the Indian shack and of Boyne when he found himself ascending the steps of the big, fashionable house on Scott Street.

A manservant admitted him, and when the man indicated that he had been expected, Barney gave him his cap and let him take his coat quite properly; he followed the man into a drawing-room where the servant pressed a button which lighted several pairs of candle-bulbs in brackets about the walls and which spread soft illumination through the room; he switched on the lights in a large, shaded lamp upon a table near the center and left Barney to await his friend.

Nothing in his experience had approximated the relation so quickly and so extraordinarily established with her after their first words together at the station at Escanaba. Only the evening before, when he first noticed her on the train, he had watched this fair, slight stranger a good deal, much as the little boy in the Indian wagon had observed the beautiful, daintily dressed girls who came to Charlevoix in summer. He had not imagined that he might even meet her; and now, wonderfully, they had become friends. More than friends, indeed; for something beyond both of them, and out of their control, had set them together in a relation which had no parallel. He thought of how he had told her, in the first hours of their acquaintance, intimacies of his life which he had never before mentioned, and how she, in turn, had shared with him her closest concerns; he thought of how she had gone to the Rock for him the morning that she had believed him killed,