His head was up, his arms were swinging free, and
there was a lightness and spring in his movements that made me forget
the grotesqueness of his gait. Nor, as the days went by, did this
buoyant happiness ever fail him. He and Ruby were inseparable from the
time she opened the rude door of her bedroom in the morning until she
bade us all good-night and carried with her all the light and charm and
joyousness of the day. The camping-out, I may as well state, had been
given up as soon as I had mentioned it, she saying to me with a little
start, as if frightened at the proposition, that she thought she'd
better stay home and help her mother. Then, seeing Jim's face fall, she
added, "But we can be off all day, can't we?"
And Jim answered that it was all right, just as Ruby said--that we would
go fishing instead, and that he had spotted an old trout that lived in a
hole down the East Branch that he'd been saving for her, and that he had
tied the day before the "very fly that will fix him"--all of which was
true, for Ruby landed him the next day with all the skill of a
professional, besides a dozen smaller ones whose haunts Jim knew.
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