Avon Fantasy Reader No. 8 — page 118: what you’re looking at

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

114 EVERIL WORRELL It was all the assurance I could get that night. She had come back to the side of the cabin where she had sat crouched before, and she resumed again that posture and sat still and silent, watching me. Sometimes I could see her eyes upon me, and sometimes not. But I felt that their gaze was unwavering. The little cold breeze, which I had finally forgotten while I was talking with her, was blowing again, and the unwholesome smell of decay grew heavier before the dawn. She would not speak again, nor answer me when I spoke to her, and I grew nervous, and strangely ill at ease. At last I went away. And in the first faint light of dawn I slipped up the stairs of my rooming-house, and into my own room. I was deadly tired at the office next day, And day after day slipped away and I grew more and more weary; for a man can not wake day and. night with- out suffering, especially in hot weather, and that was what I was doing. I . haunted the old tow-path and waited, night after night, on the bank opposite the sunken boat. Sometimes I saw my lady of the darkness, and sometimes not. When I saw her, she spoke little: but sometimes she sat there on the top of the cabin and let me watch her till the dawn, or until the strange uneasi- ness that was like fright drove me from her and back to my room, where I tossed restlessly in the heat and dreamed strange dreams, half waking, till the sun shone in on my forehead and I tumbled into my clothes and down to the office again. Once I asked her why she had made the fanciful condition that she would not come ashore to meet me until the waters of the canal had ceased to run. (How eagerly I studied those waters! How I stole away at noontime more than once, not to approach the old boat, but to watch the almost imperceptible cowndrift of bubbles, bits of straw, twigs, rubbish!) My questioning displeased her, and I asked her that no more. It was enough that she chose to be whimsical. My part was to wait. It was more than a week later that I questioned her again, this time on a different subject. And after that, I curbed my curiosity relentlessly. “Never speak to me of things you do not understand about me. Never again, or I will not show myself to you again. And when I walk on the path yonder, it will not be with you.” I had asked her what form of persecution she and her father had suffered in the city, that had driven them out to this lonely place, and where in the city they had lived. - Frightened seriously lest I lose the ground I was sure I had gained with her, I was about to speak of something else. But before I could find the words, her low voice came to me again. | “It was horrible, horrible! Those little houses below the bridge, those houses along the canal—tell me, are they not worse than my boat? Life there was shut in, and furtive. I was not free as I am now—and the freedom I will com -@) books.com