THE STEADFAST HEART
These were matters about which he talked to Dave Wilkins and to Craig Browning, matters which interested him, called out the best that was in him—displayed a quick intelligence, a ready expression of ideas, and no mean originality of thought…. He did not know he was talking to one who was, in effect, a guest of honor, to a girl whose social place in the world outside Rainbow was one to which even Lydia Canfield looked with respect and possibly with envy. She regarded Angus with ever growing surprise. He was the sort of young man she had not expected to encounter in this backwater of Rainbow.
Suddenly she became aware of his silence, a tense, listening silence, and she lifted her eyes to his face. It was gray, drawn. Little white lumps appeared at the corners of his jaws, and in his eyes was such a misery as she had never before seen looking out from the face of a human being…. Behind the bench on which they sat, concealed in the darkness, she heard two boys talking, Malcolm Crane speaking hotly, but in subdued tones to young Hammond.
“It’s a shame…. It’s an outrage,” he was saying. “Whatever possessed Lydia to invite him here?”
“No telling what Lydia will do when she takes the bit in her teeth,” Hammond answered. “But
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