Janet | Page 2

wish you were different." Her gaze traveled slowly from his round-toed boots to his neatly brushed hair; a dr4eamy look came into her eyes, and the little flecks of gold in the soft-brown iris caught the sun's rays and glistened. She sighed profoundly.
"But if you couldn't kill a snake," she said, speaking more to herself than to him, "why, you couldn't ever kill a dragon, you see; nor ride a coal-black charger, nor fight for your lady's favor -- " Her brow wrinkled in a puzzled frown, but it cleared almost at once. "I was forgetting," she laughed; "you wouldn't want to anyway, so it doesn't matter; that is, not so very much."
She looked around for her Boru; he was busily investigating the remains of the snake in the bushes, but at her whistle he trotted obediently to her heel, and together they walked off down the road.
Harry, after a miserable minute of indecision, followed.
They walked in silence, Janet a little ahead, until they reached the road that ran along the waterfront and passed the white gate of the old Page house.
"Aren't you going to go with me anymore?" Harry asked forlornly.
Janet stopped and looked at him.
"Maybe."
"When?"
"Don't know."
"Well, I don't care if you don't; you're just a girl anyway." Harry's lip trembled ever so slightly and he turned on his heel and hurried off, trying to hold his head high.
Janet swung on the gate for a few minutes and watched him until a bend in the road hid him from view, then she went up the long flight of stone steps.
The Page house crowned the terrace above. It was big, somber and very old. To Janet it seemed to be very tired, too, as though it had waited and waited a long time for the sea, whose waves beat incessantly on the shore below, to yield some secret now long-forgotten by the living world.
Four stern columns guarded the square porch and the old-fashioned, ivory-white door with its leaded fan lights and heavy knocker. Janet slipped noiselessly into the wide hall that reflected the glow of polished mahogany and soft afternoon sunlight. Just as she tiptoed across the thick rag rugs and was half way up the stairs, the big grandfather clock boomed three, and as if in echo to it a voice, quavering but still clear and penetrating, called:
"Is that you, Janet?"
Janet had a sudden and unheard of wish not to answer, but she conquered it and replied at once:
"Yes, grandmother, it's me." Before the words had had time to float down the stairs she was conscious of her mistake. "Drat the personal pronoun anyway," she said to herself; "now I will catch it."
"Janet, I called you," the voice came again, and Janet started guiltily.
"I'm coming, grandmother," she answered, and walked primly back downstairs.
Mrs. Page's room was on the first floor at the back of the house away from the sea and overlooking a trim little garden. And old-fashioned sleigh bed stood between the windows, and in the very middle of it a little old lady, wearing an immense cap, sat propped up against half a dozen pillows.
This was Mrs. Page, Janet's grandmother. She was perhaps the most feared and certainly the most respected woman in Old Chester, and although she had been bedridden for as many years as Janet could remember she took a lively interest in the affairs of the community, and no important step was ever taken until Cap'n Page's widow was consulted. Her advice had a way of sounding very much like a command.
Janet knew the room by heart. She could have told the location of everything in it with her eyes blindfolded, so she wasted no time in looking about her but went straight up to the bed and sat down on the low chair, where all Mrs. Page's callers sat. It was placed so that she could see them without twisting her neck; a thing she particularly disliked having to do.
"You called me, grandmother?'
Two steely blue eyes opened slowly, and seemed to bore into the soft depth of Janet's brown ones.
"I did, there can be no doubt of that; nor, I may add, of your reply."
For perhaps the first time in her life Janet interrupted her.
"I know I said me instead of I, but I was thinking of something else and I forgot," she exclaimed impatiently.
"And may I ask what you were thinking of?" Mrs. Page inquired in surprise.
Janet frowned and shook her head. "It's not the slightest use to, for you'd never, never, understand. You see, it was something entirely different from all this." She looked around the immaculate room and shook her head again, this time in despair.
Mrs. Page lifted herself on one elbow and looked at her grand-daughter carefully for a full minute.
"Janet," she said severely, "what has come over you?"
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