can make
the things they do. There was some little walrus ivory carvings on the
what-not, and on the mantel a row of pink mounted shells, and the model
of her father's barkentine when he was in the China trade was on the
wall in a glass case.

There's many rooms alike here in this town, with the furniture kept so
nice and the things the men's brought back with 'em from the north and
south, as you'd expect in a seafaring town--

"What ails this room?" I said.

"Why, it's the folks who made it," says she. "So many and from so far.
The whole world's here!" She went on like that until it seemed to me the
room was full of folks--savages and Eskimos and seafaring men dead a
long while ago, all of 'em. It was wonderful if you looked at it that
way.

"So," she said, jumping out on me sudden, "what's there strange about
Moira feeling like she does when there's rooms like this? It's less
common, but it's no more wonderful."

I saw what she meant, though at the time her explanation of Moira seemed
just nonsense to me. Though I'll say I could tell myself when Moira lost
what she called "her good." She'd be like a lost child; she'd be like a
plant without water and without sun.

Except for that she grew up just like any other girl, a favorite with
the children, and a lovely dancer. Only there it was--she had something
that other children didn't. It came and went, and when it went away she
would grow dim like a smoky lamp. I got so used to it that it just
seemed to me like a part of Moira. Nothing that marked her off from
nobody, or that gave you anything like a queer and creepy feeling about
her. Quite the contrary. She just seemed to have an abiding loveliness
about her that everybody else ought to have but didn't, not so much.

When Kenneth Everett came along, "Well," thinks I, "I might have saved
myself the worry." For worry I always had for fear that this other
feeling of hers would cut her off from the regular things in life. It
would have been all very well in another time in the world when a girl
could go off and be a saint, but there was no such place for a girl to
go in a town like ours.

There was no one but Moira for Kenneth from the first. He was as dark as
she was fair; sunlight and starshine they seemed to me. It used to make
me happy just to see him come storming in calling out, "Moira!" from the
time he passed the Rose of Sharon bush at the gate.

Things in those days seemed right to me. Maybe I didn't se