THE BIRD ON ITS JOURNEY
BY BEATRICE HARRADEN
It was about four in the afternoon when a young girl came into the
salon of the little hotel at C---- in Switzerland, and drew her chair up to the
fire.
"You are soaked through," said an elderly lady, who was herself trying
to get roasted. "You ought to lose no time in changing your clothes."
"I have not anything to change," said the young girl, laughing. "Oh, I
shall soon be dry!"
"Have you lost all your luggage?" asked the lady, sympathetically.
"No," said the young girl; "I had none to lose." And she smiled a little
mischievously, as though she knew by instinct that her companion\'s
sympathy would at once degenerate into suspicion!
"I don\'t mean to say that I have not a knapsack," she added,
considerately. "I have walked a long distance--in fact, from Z----."
"And where did you leave your companions?" asked the lady, with a
touch of forgiveness in her voice.
"I am without companions, just as I am without luggage," laughed the
girl.
And then she opened the piano, and struck a few notes. There was
something caressing in the way in which she touched the keys; whoever
she was, she knew how to make sweet music; sad music, too, full of that
undefinable longing, like the holding out of one\'s arms to one\'s friends in
the hopeless distance.
The lady bending over the fire looked up at the little girl, and forgot
that she had brought neither friends nor luggage with her. She hesitated for
one moment, and then she took the childish face between her hands and
kissed it.