For the next three weeks Eric Marshall seemed to himself to be living two lives, as distinct from each other as if he a double personality. In one, he taught the Lindsay district school and ; solved problems; argued on theology with Robert Williamson; called at the homes of his pupils and took tea in state with their parents; went to a dance or two and played , all unwittingly, with the hearts of the Lindsay .  
But this life was a dream of workaday. He only LIVED in the other, which was spent in an old , and overgrown, where the minutes seemed to lag for sheer love of the spot and the June winds made wild in the old spruces.
 
Here every evening he met Kilmeny; in that old orchard they hours of quiet happiness together; together they went wandering in the fair fields of old romance; together they read many books and talked of many things; and, when they were tired of all else, Kilmeny played to him and the old orchard echoed with her lovely, fantastic melodies.
 
At every meeting her beauty came home afresh to him with the old thrill of glad surprise. In the of absence it seemed to him that she could not possibly be as beautiful as he remembered her; and then when they met she seemed even more so. He learned to watch for the undisguised light of welcome that always leaped into her eyes at the sound of his footsteps. She was nearly always there before him and she always showed that she was glad to see him with the frank delight of a child watching for a dear comrade.
 
She was never in the same mood twice. Now she was grave, now gay, now stately, now . But she was always charming. Thrawn and twisted the old Gordon stock might be, but it had at least this one offshoot of perfect grace and symmetry. Her mind and heart, unspoiled of the world, were as beautiful as her face. All the ugliness of existence had passed her by, shrined in her double of upbringing and muteness.
 
She was naturally quick and clever. little flashes of wit and humour sparkled out occasionally. She could be whimsical—even charmingly capricious. Sometimes innocent out in the unfathomable deeps of her blue eyes. , even, was not unknown to her. Now and then she some harmless bubble of a young man’s or masculine superiority with a biting little line of daintily written script.
 
She assimilated the ideas in the books they read, speedily, eagerly, and , always seizing on the best and truest, and rejecting the false and spurious and weak with an unfailing intuition at which Eric . Hers was the spear of Ithuriel, trying out the of everything and leaving only the pure gold.
 
In manner and outlook she was still a child. Yet now and again she was as old as Eve. An expression would leap into her laughing face, a subtle meaning reveal itself in her smile, that held all the of womanhood and all the wisdom of the ages.
 
Her way of smiling him. The smile always began far down in her eyes and flowed outward to her face like a sparkling stealing out of shadow into sunshine.
 
He knew everything about her life. She told him her simple history freely. She often mentioned her uncle and aunt and seemed to regard them with deep affection. She rarely of her mother. Eric came somehow to understand, less from what she said than from what she did not say, that Kilmeny, though she had loved her mother, had always been rather afraid of her. There had not been between them the natural beautiful confidence of mother and child.
 
Of Neil, she wrote frequently at first, and seemed very fond of him. Later she ceased to mention him. Perhaps—for she was marvellously quick to catch and interpret every change of expression in his voice and face—she discerned what Eric did not know himself—that his eyes clouded and grew at the mention of Neil’s name.
 
Once she asked him ,
 
“Are there many people like you out in the world?”
 
“Thousands of them,” said Eric, laughing.
 
She looked gravely at him. Then she gave her head a quick little shake.
 
“I do not think so,” she wrote. “I do not know much of the world, but I do not think there are many people like you in it.”
 
One evening, when the far-away hills and fields were scarfed in gauzy purples, and the intervales were brimming with golden mists, Eric carried to the old orchard a little limp, worn volume that held a love story. It was the first thing of the kind he had ever read to her, for in the first novel he had lent her the love interest had been very slight and subordinate. This was a beautiful, idyl told.
 
He read it to her, lying in the grass at her feet; she listened with her hands clasped over her knee and her eyes cast down. It was not a long story; and when he had finished it he shut the book and looked up at her questioningly.
 
“Do you like it, Kilmeny?” he asked.
 
Very slowly she took her and wrote,
 
“Yes, I like it. But it hurt me, too. I did not know that a person could like anything that hurt her. I do not know why it hurt me. I felt as if I had lost something that I never had. That was a very silly feeling, was it not? But I did not understand the book very well, you see. It is about love and I do not know anything about love. Mother told me once that love is a curse, and that I must pray that it would never enter into my life. She said it very earnestly, and so I believed her. But your book teaches that it is a . It says that it is the most splendid and wonderful thing in life. Which am I to believe?”
 
“Love—real love—is never a curse, Kilmeny,” said Eric gravely. “There is a false love which IS a curse. Perhaps your mother believed it was that which had entered her life and ruined it; and so she made the mistake. There is nothing in the world—or in heaven either, as I believe—so truly beautiful and wonderful and blessed as love.”
 
“Have you ever loved?” asked Kilmeny, with the directness of phrasing by her mode of communication which was sometimes a little terrible. She asked the question simply and without . She knew of no reason why love might not be discussed with Eric as other matters—music and books and travel—might be.
 
“No,” said Eric—honestly, as he thought, “but every one has an ideal of love whom he hopes to meet some day—‘the ideal woman of a young man’s dream.’ I suppose I have mine, in some sealed, secret of my heart.&rd............