A Tangled Web by L. M. Montgomery Page B

and didn’t think they were Presbyterian ornaments.
    Both Big and Little Sam had only an academic interest in the old Dark jug. Their cousinship was too far off to give them any claim on it. But they never missed attending any clan gathering. Big Sam might get material for a poem out of it and Little Sam might see a pretty girl or two. He was reflecting now that Gay Penhallow had got to be a regular little beauty and that Thora Dark was by way of being a fine armful. And there was something about Donna Dark—something confoundedly seductive. William Y.’s Sara was undeniably handsome, but she was a trained nurse and Little Sam always felt that she knew too much about her own and other people’s insides to be really charming. As for Mrs. Alpheus Penhallow’ s Nan, about whom there had been so much talk, Little Sam gravely decided that she was “too jazzy.”
    But Joscelyn Dark, now. She had always been a looker. What the divvle could have come between her and Hugh? Little Sam thought “divvle” was far less profane than “devil”—softer like. For an old sea-dog Little Sam was fussy about his language.
    Oswald Dark had been standing at the far end of the veranda, his large, agate-gray, expressionless eyes fixed on the sky and the golden edge of the world that was the valley of Bay Silver. He wore, as usual, a long black linen coat reaching to his feet and, as usual, he was bareheaded. His long brown hair, in which there was not a white thread, parted in the middle, was as wavy as a woman’s. His cheeks were hollow but his face was strangely unlined. The Darks and Penhallows were as ashamed of him as they had once been proud. In his youth Oswald Dark had been a brilliant student, with the ministry in view. Nobody knew why he “went off.” Some hinted at an unhappy love affair; some maintained it was simply overwork. A few shook their heads over the fact that Oswald’s grandmother had been an outsider—a Moorland from down east. Who knew what sinister strain she might have brought into the pure Dark and Penhallow blood?
    Whatever the reason, Oswald Dark was now considered a harmless lunatic. He wandered at will over the pleasant red roads of the Island, and on moonlight nights sang happily as he strode along, with an occasional genuflection to the moon. On moonless nights he was bitterly unhappy and wept to himself in woods and remote corners. When he grew hungry he would call in at the first house, knock thunderingly on the door as if it had no right to be shut, and demand food regally. As everybody knew him he always got it, and no house was shut to him in the cold of a winter night. Sometimes he would disappear from human ken for weeks at a time. But, as William Y. said, he had an uncanny instinct for clan pow-wows of any sort and invariably turned up at them, though he could seldom be persuaded to enter the house where they were being held. As a rule he took no notice of people he met in his wanderings—except to scowl darkly at them when they demanded jocularly, “How’s the moon?”—but he never passed Joscelyn Dark without smiling at her—a strange eerie smile—and once he had spoken to her.
    â€œYou are seeking the moon, too. I know it. And you’re unhappy because you can’t get it. But it’s better to want the moon, even if you can’t get it—the beautiful silvery remote Lady Moon—as unattainable as things of perfect beauty ever are—than to want and get anything else. Nobody knows that but you and me. It’s a wonderful secret, isn’t it? Nothing else matters.”
    9
    The folks in the parlor were getting a bit restless. What—the devil or the mischief—according to sex—was keeping Ambrosine Winkworth so long getting the jug? Aunt Becky lay impassive, gazing immovably at a plaster decoration on the ceiling which, Stanton Grundy reflected, looked exactly like a sore. Drowned