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Walter felt the man worth knowing, but felt also something about him that repelled him. In his room, Walter threw himself in a chair, and sat without thinking, for the mental presence of Lufa was hardly thought Gradually Sefton's story revived, and for a time displaced the image of Lufa. It was the first immediately authenticated ghost-narration he had ever heard.
I know no reason why any woman should love me, and if no woman can find any, I most go alone. Lufa has found none yet, and life and love too seem to have gone out of me waiting. If you ask me why I do not give it all up, I have no answer. You will say for Lufa, it is only that the right man is not come! It may be so; but I believe there is more than that in it. I fear she is all outside.
Walter lifted his head. The word loved wrought on him like a spell: he was sadly a creature of words! He looked at her with flushed face and flashing eyes. Often had Lufa thought him handsome, but she had never felt it as she did now. "Let it be so!" he said. "Be my sister-friend, Lufa.
She made, and he expected, no acknowledgment, but she did not return the verses. Lyric after lyric, with Lufa for its inspiration, he wrought, like damask flowers, into his poem. Every evening, and all the evening, sometimes late into the morning, he fashioned and filed, until at length it was finished.
"Nothing but your love, Lufa, can be a comfort to me. That would make me one of the blessed!" "I like you very much. If you were a girl, I should say I loved you." "Why not say it as it is?" "Would you be content with the love I should give a girl? Some of you want so much!" "I will be glad of any love you can give me. But to say I should be content with any love you could give me, would be false.
I don't often tell the story, for I have an odd weakness for being believed; and nobody ever does believe that story, though it is as true as I live; and when a thing is true, the blame lies with those that don't believe it. Ain't you of my mind, Mr. Colman?" "You had better not appeal to him!" said Lufa. "Mr. Colman does not believe a word of the stories he has been telling.
"The binding of my book, I mean," he explained. "It is a good color." He felt his hope rather damped. "Will you let me read a little from it?" "With pleasure. You shall have an audience in the drawing-room, after luncheon." "Oh, Lufa! how could you think I would read my own poems to a lot of people!" "I beg your pardon! Will the summer-house do?" "Yes, indeed; nowhere better." "Very well!
Lufa was there alone! He durst not approach her, but if he seated himself in a certain corner, he could see her and she him! He did not, however, apprehend that the corner he had chosen was entirely in shadow, or reflect that the globe of a lamp was almost straight between them. He thought she saw him, but she did not.
"She wants me to cut a good figure!" he said to himself, and went to get ready. I have no deed of prowess on Walter's part to record. The instant he was in the saddle, Red Racket recognized a master. "You can't have ridden him before?" questioned Lufa. "I never saw him till this morning." "He likes you, I suppose!" she said.
Walter had not been an impressionable youth, because he had an imagination which both made him fastidious, and stood him in stead of falling in love. When a man can give form to the things that move in him, he is less driven to fall in love. But now Walter saw everything through a window, and the window was the face of Lufa. His thinking was always done in the presence and light of that window.
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