CHAPTER XXXVII.
A SUMMER AFTERNOON.
"Let it stay there a while," Murdoch had said. "I am not ready for it yet." And it staid there between the head-stone and the old stone wall covered with the long grass and closed in by it. He was not ready for it yet. The days were not long enough for him as it was. His mother and Christian rarely saw him, but at such times as they did each recognized in him a new look and understood it. He began to live a strange, excited life. Rachel Ffrench did nothing by halves. He was seen with her constantly. It continually happened that where she was invited he was invited also. He forgot that he dreaded to meet strangers and had always held aloof from crowds. There were no strangers now and no crowds; in any gathering there was only one presence and this was enough for him. When people would have cultivated him and drawn him out, he did not see their efforts; when men and women spoke to him they found that he scarcely heard them and that even as they talked he had unconsciously veered toward another point. He did things sometimes which made them stare at him.
"The fellow is like a ghost," a man said of him once.
The simile was not a bad one. He did not think of what he might be winning or losing—for the time being
