"Why! How dark it is!" exclaimed Starr as she turned to her companion again and found she could scarcely see his face. "Why! How queer! Where is the twilight? Is anything the matter? I never saw it get dark all at once like this!" She peered around into the strange velvet darkness with troubled eyes.
Michael was all attention at once.
"No, that's all right," he assured her. "That's the way we do here. Almost everybody from the north speaks about it at first. They can't understand it. Its the difference in the position of the sun, nearer the equator, you know. I'll show you all about it on the chart in the astronomical room if you care to see. We haven't any twilight here. I should think twilight would be queer. You wouldn't just know when night began and day ended. I don't remember about it when I lived in New York. Look up there! That's the evening star! It's come out for you to-night--to welcome another--Starr!"
Oh, Michael, of unknown origin! Whence came that skill of delicate compliment, that grace of courtesy, that you, plucked from the slime of the gutter, set apart from all sweetening influences of loving contact with, womankind, should be able so gallantly and respectfully to guide the young girl through the darkness, touching her little elbow distantly, tactfully, reverently, exactly as the college president helps his wife across the road on Sabbath to the church? Is it only instinct, come down from some patrician ancestor of gallant ways and kind, or have you watched and caught the knack from the noble scholar who is your ideal of all that is manly?
They walked silently through the warm darkness until they came within the circle of light from the open door, and matron and teachers came out to welcome the young stranger and bring her into the house.
Michael lingered for a moment by the door, watching her as she went with the matron, her sweet face wreathed in smiles, the matron's thin arm around her and a new and gentle look upon her severe countenance; watched until they mounted the stairs out of sight; then he went out of doors.
Taking off his cap he stood reverently looking up at the star, communing with it perhaps about the human Starr that had come back to him out of the shadows of the past.
And she was a star. No one who saw her but acknowledged it. He marvelled as he recalled the change wrought in the face of the matron and because of her gentleness to the little girl forgave her all that she had not been to his motherless boyhood.