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A Soul That Was Not At Home
by
“I’ll try to remember,” Miss Trevor agreed.
“Well, I was sitting here one evening just like I was last night, and the sun was setting. And an enchanted boat came sailing over the sea and I got into her. The boat was all pearly like the inside of the mussel shells, and her sail was like moonshine. Well, I sailed right across to the sunset. Think of that–I’ve been in the sunset! And what do you suppose it is? The sunset is a land all flowers, like a great garden, and the clouds are beds of flowers. We sailed into a great big harbour, a thousand times bigger than the harbour over there at your hotel, and I stepped out of the boat on a ‘normous meadow all roses. I stayed there for ever so long. It seemed almost a year, but the Youngest Twin Sailor says I was only away a few hours or so. You see, in Sunset Land the time is ever so much longer than it is here. But I was glad to come back too. I’m always glad to come back to the cove and Stephen. Now, you know this never really happened.”
Miss Trevor would not give up the foolscap book so easily, but for a long time Paul refused to show it to her. She came to the cove every day, and every day Paul seemed more delightful to her. He was so quaint, so clever, so spontaneous. Yet there was nothing premature or unnatural about him. He was wholly boy, fond of fun and frolic, not too good for little spurts of quick temper now and again, though, as he was careful to explain to Miss Trevor, he never showed them to a lady.
“I get real mad with the Twin Sailors sometimes, and even with Stephen, for all he’s so good to me. But I couldn’t be mad with you or Nora or the Golden Lady. It would never do.”
Every day he had some new story to tell of a wonderful adventure on rock or sea, always taking the precaution of assuring her beforehand that it wasn’t true. The boy’s fancy was like a prism, separating every ray that fell upon it into rainbows. He was passionately fond of the shore and water. The only world for him beyond Noel’s Cove was the world of his imagination. He had no companions except Stephen and the “rock people.”
“And now you,” he told Miss Trevor. “I love you too, but I know you’ll be going away before long, so I don’t let myself love you as much–quite–as Stephen and the rock people.”
“But you could, couldn’t you?” pleaded Miss Trevor. “If you and I were to go on being together every day, you could love me just as well as you love them, couldn’t you?”
Paul considered in a charming way he had.
“Of course I could love you better than the Twin Sailors and the Golden Lady,” he announced finally. “And I think perhaps I could love you as much as I love Stephen. But not as much as Nora–oh, no, I wouldn’t love you quite as much as Nora. She was first, you see; she’s always been there. I feel sure I couldn’t ever love anybody as much as Nora.”
One day when Stephen was out to the mackerel grounds, Paul took Miss Trevor into the little grey house and showed her his treasures. They climbed the ladder in one corner to the loft where Paul slept. The window of it, small and square-paned, looked seaward, and the moan of the sea and the pipe of the wind sounded there night and day. Paul had many rare shells and seaweeds, curious flotsam and jetsam of shore storms, and he had a small shelf full of books.
“They’re splendid,” he said enthusiastically. “Stephen brought me them all. Every time Stephen goes to town to ship his mackerel he brings me home a new book.”