Avon Fantasy Reader No. 8 — page 115: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE CANAL : ~ iii sound like a long-drawn shudder of protest? There was a strangeness in the tones of her voice that held me wondering, every time she spoke. “No, no. Oh, no! You must not swim across.” “Then—could I come tomorrow, or some day soon, in the daytime; and would you let me come on board pees would you come on shore and : talk to me, perhaps?” | “Not in the daytime—wnever in she daytime!” Again the intensity of her low-toned negation held me spellbound. It was not her sense of the impropriety of the hour, then, that had dictated her manner. For surely, any girl with the slightest sense of the fitness of things would rather have a tryst by daytime than after midnight—yet there was an-inference in her last words that if I came again it should be again at night. Stull feeling the spell that had enthralled me, as one does not forget the presence of a drug in the air that is stealing one’s senses, even when- those senses begin to wander and to busy themselves with other things, I yet spoke shortly. “Why do you say, ‘Never in the daytime’? Do you mean that I may come more than this once at night, though now. you won't let me cross the canal to you at the expense of my own clothes, and you won’t put down your plank or draw-bridge or whatever you come on shore with, and talk to me here for only a moment? I'll come again, if you'll let me talk to you instead of calling across the water. Ill come again, any time you will let me—day or night, I don’t care. I want to come to you. But I only ask you to explain. If I came in the daytime and met your father, wouldn’t that be the best thing to do? Then we could be really acquainted—we could be friends.” “In the nighttime, my father sleeps. In the daytime, 7 sleep. How could I talk to you, or introduce you to my father then? If you came on board this boat in the daytime, you would find my father—and you would be sorry. As for me, I would be sleeping. I could never introduce you to my father, do you see?” “You sleep soundly, you and your father.” Again there was pique in my voice. : 3 | ; “Yes, we sleep Seundly.” “And always at different times?” “Always at different times. We are on guard—one of us is always on guard. We have been hardly used, down there in your city. And we have taken refuge here. And we.are always—always—on guard.” : | ‘The resentment vanished from my breast, and I felt my heart go out to her anew. She was so pale, so pitiful in the night. My eyes were learning better and better how to pierce the darkness; they were giving me a more definite picture of my companion—if I could think of her as a companion, between myself and whom stretched the black water. icboo!