The Blue Castle

Alancy had walked out to Roaring Abel’s house on the Mistawis road under a sky of purple and amber, with a queer exhilaration and expectancy in her heart. Back there, behind her, her mother and Cousin Stickles were crying—over themselves, not over her. But here the wind was in her face, soft, dew-wet, cool, blowing along the grassy roads. Oh, she loved the wind! The robins were whistling sleepily in the firs along the way and the moist air was fragrant with the tang of balsam. Big cars went purring past in the violet dusk—the stream of summer tourists to Muskoka had already begun—but Valancy did not envy any of their occupants. Muskoka cottages might be charming, but beyond, in the sunset skies, among the spires of the firs, her Blue Castle towered. She brushed the old years and habits and inhibitions away from her like dead leaves. She would _not_ be littered with them. Roaring Abel’s rambling, tumble-down old house was situated about three miles from the village, on the very edge of “up back,” as the sparsely settled, hilly, wooded country around Mistawis was called vernacularly. It did not, it must be confessed, look much like a Blue Castle. It had once been a snug place enough in the days when Abel Gay had been young and prosperous, and the punning, arched sign over the gate—“A. Gay, Carpenter,” had been fine and freshly painted. Now it was a faded, dreary old place, with a leprous, patched roof and shutters hanging askew. Abel never seemed to do any carpenter jobs about his own house. It had a listless air, as if tired of life. There was a dwindling grove of ragged, crone-like old spruces behind it. The garden, which Cissy used to keep neat and pretty, had run wild. On two sides of the house were fields full of nothing but mulleins. Behind the house was a long stretch of useless barrens, full of scrub pines and spruces, with here and there a blossoming bit of wild cherry, running back to a belt of timber on the shores of Lake Mistawis, two miles away. A rough, rocky, boulder-strewn lane ran through it to the woods—a lane white with pestiferous, beautiful daisies. Roaring Abel met Valancy at the door. “So you’ve come,” he said incredulously. “I never s’posed that ruck of Stirlings would let you.” Valancy showed all her pointed teeth in a grin. “They couldn’t stop me.” “I didn’t think you’d so much spunk,” said Roaring Abel admiringly. “And look at the nice ankles of her,” he added, as he stepped aside to let her in. If Cousin Stickles had heard this she would have been certain that Valancy’s doom, earthly and unearthly, was sealed. But Abel’s superannuated gallantry did not worry Valancy. Besides, this was the first compliment she had ever received in her life and she found herself liking it. She sometimes suspected she had nice ankles, but nobody had ever mentioned it before. In the Stirling...