Yet Lois caught faint glimpses, I think, sometimes, of its
heavenly clearness. I think it was this light that made the
burning of Christmas fires warmer for her than for others, that
showed her all the love and outspoken honesty and hearty frolic
which her eyes saw perpetually in the old warm-hearted world.
That evening, as she sat on the step of her frame-shanty,
knitting at a great blue stocking, her scarred face and misshapen
body very pitiful to the passers-by, it was this that gave to her
face its homely, cheery smile. It made her eyes quick to know
the message in the depths of colour in the evening sky, or even
the flickering tints of the green creeper on the wall with its
crimson cornucopias filled with hot shining. She liked clear,
vital colours, this girl,--the crimsons and blues. They answered
her, somehow. They could speak. There were things in the world
that like herself were marred,--did not understand,--were hungry
to know: the gray sky, the mud streets, the tawny lichens. She
cried sometimes, looking at them, hardly knowing why: she could
not help it, with a vague sense of loss. It seemed at those
times so dreary for them to be alive,--or for her. Other things
her eyes were quicker to see than ours: delicate or grand lines,
which she perpetually sought for unconsciously,--in the homeliest
things, the very soft curling of the woollen yarn in her fingers,
as in the eternal sculpture of the mountains. Was it the disease
of her injured brain that made all things alive to her,--that
made her watch, in her ignorant way, the grave hills, the
flashing, victorious rivers, look pitifully into the face of some
starved hound, or dingy mushroom trodden in the mud before it
scarce had lived, just as we should look into human faces to know
what they would say to us? Was it weakness and ignorance that
made everything she saw or touched nearer, more human to her than