Free The Story of a Whim by Grace Livingston Hill Page B

knew that their way was a bad way. Each man was glad at heart when Christie made an innovation. They came to the Sunday school and helped, controlling their laughter admirably whenever Uncle Moses gave occasion; and they listened to Christie's lessons, which, to say the least, were original, with a courteous deference, mingled with a kind of pride that one of their number could do this.
    They also refrained from urging him to go with them on any more revellings. Always he was asked, but in a tone that he came to feel meant that they did not expect him to accept, and would perhaps have been disappointed if he had done so.
    Once, when Christie, unthinkingly, half-assented to go on an all-day's ride with some of them, Mortimer put his hand kindly on Christie's shoulder, and said in a tone Christie had never heard him use before: "I wouldn't, Chris. It might be a bore."
    Christie turned, and looked earnestly into his eyes for a minute, and then said, "Thank you, Mort!"
    As he stood watching them ride away, a sudden instinct made him reach his hand to Mortimer, and say, "Stay with me this time, old fellow"; but the other shook his head, smiling some what sadly, Christie thought, and said as he rode off after the others, "Too late, Chris; it isn't any use."
    Christie thought about it a good deal that day as he went about his grove without his customary whistle, and at night, before he began his evening's reading and writing, he knelt and breathed his first prayer for the soul of another.
    The winter blossomed into spring, and the soft wind blew the breath of yellow Jessamine and bay blossoms from the swamps. Christie's wire fence bloomed out into a mass of Cherokee roses, and among the glossy orange-leaves there gleamed many a white, starry blossom, earnest of the golden fruit to come.
    Christie with throbbing heart and shining eyes picked his first orange-blossoms, a goodly handful, and, packing them after the most approved methods for long journeys, sent them to Hazel Winship.
    Never any or anges, be they numbered by thousands of boxes, could give him the pleasure that those first white waxen blossoms gave as he laid his face gently among them and breathed a blessing on the one to whom they went, before he packed them tenderly in their box.
    Christie was deriving daily joy now from Hazel Winship's friendship. Sometimes when he remembered the tender little sentences in her letters his heart fairly stood still with longing that she might know who he was and yet be ready to say them to him. Then he would crush this wish down, and grind his heel upon it, and tell his better self that only on condition of never thinking such a thought again would he allow another letter written her, another thought sent toward her.
    Then would he remember the joy she had already brought into his life, and go smiling about his work, singing,
    "He holds the key of all unknown, And I am glad."
    Hazel Winship spent that first summer after her graduation, most of it, visiting among her college friends at various summer resorts at seaside or on mountaintop. But she did not forget to cheer Christie's lonely summer days—more lonely now because some of his friends had gone North for a while—with bits of letters written from shady nooks on porch or lawn, or sitting in a hammock.
    "Christie, you are my safety-valve," she wrote once. "I think you take the place with me of a diary. Most girls use a diary for that. If I was at home with mother, I might use her sometimes; but there are a good many things that if I should write her she would worry, and there really isn't any need, but I could not make her sure. So you see I have to bother you. For instance, there is a young man here—" Christie drew his brows together fiercely. This was a new aspect.
    There were other young men, then. Of course—and he drew a deep sigh.
    It was during the reading of that letter that Christie began to wish there were some way for him to make his real self known to Hazel Winship.