ake up a boy's love
for the women belonging to him. She was not clever: but he regarded the
simplicity of her mind with pride. This seemed to give her her crowning
charm. "Any fellow can be clever," Jock said to himself. It was part of
Lucy's superiority that she was not so. He arrived at the railway
station at Farafield with much excitement in his mind, though his looks
were quiet enough. The place, though it was the first he had ever known,
did not attract a thought from the other and more important meeting. It
was a wet day in August, and the coachman who had been sent for him gave
him a note to say that Lucy would have come to meet him but for the
rain. He was rather glad of the rain, this being the case. He did not
want to meet her on a railway platform--he even regretted the long
stretches of the stubble fields as he whirled past, and wished that the
way had been longer, though he was so anxious to see her. And when he
jumped down at the great door of the hall and found himself in the
embrace of his sister, the youth was thrilling with excitement, hope,
and pleasure. Lucy had changed much less than he had. Jock, who had been
the smallest of pale-faced boys, was now long and weedy, with limbs and
fingers of portentous length. His hair was light and limp; his large
eyes, well set in his head, had a vague and often dreamy look. It was
impossible to call him a handsome boy. There was an entire want of
colour about him, as there had been about Lucy in her first youth, and
his gray morning clothes, like the little gray dress she had worn as a
young girl were not very becoming to him. They had been so long apart
that he met her very shyly, with an awkwardness that almost looked like
reluctance, and for the first hour scarcely knew what to say to her, so
full was he of the wonder and pleasure of being by her, and the
impossibility of expressing this. She asked him about his journey, and
he made the usual replies, scarcely knowing what he said, but looking at
her with a suppressed beatitude which made Jock dull in the very
intensity of his feeling. The rain came steadily down outside, shutting
them in as with veils of falling water. Sir Tom, in order to leave them
entirely free to have their first meeting over, had taken himself off
for the day. Lucy took her young brother into the inner drawing-room,
the centre of her own life. She made him sit down in a luxurious chair,
and stood over him gazing at the boy, who was abashed