showed an interest in his ideas, and the latter had a way of steering them into dubious channels.
Meanwhile Paul was continually being put off the field for "fumbling the ball" or lack of team sense. His most familiar sensation came to be that of yearning, followed by retaliatory moods given over to the building of a wall of indifference, moods coloured by music and stories. Loneliness, fear, doubt were his familiars, and his confidante was an aunt who, if one were not infinitely tactful, would glide away and sit for hours looking out of the window at nothing. More and more he resorted to silence, and, where necessary—as in the case of clothes—defiance of public opinion, but there was a heavy mental and emotional price to pay for silence and defiance, and his shoulders were never free of the burden of anomaly. This gave a tentative quality even to his most spontaneous smiles and made him inordinately diffident.
One of the few beings with whom there was no need for play-acting was the sympathetic old Portuguese, and, in the twilight of summer evenings when Paul went off to the pasture to help drive home the cow from which Mr. Silva derived part of his small income, there was a blessed sense of security in the companionship. He had not been able to tell Mr. Silva about Leila, for there were no words for his feeling, but he had told him about the afternoon when he and Wilfrid Fraser had gone with empty tomato tins and an axe into the summer woods to hunt for maple sugar and by force of talking about the possibility of a bull appearing on the scene had turned and run for their lives, though there wasn't a bull within a mile. Mr. Silva had gently explained that maple sugar could be drawn only in the first months of the year when the snow was still on the ground. Anyone else would have mocked him for being so ignorant and timid.
Mr. Silva had once been carpenter on a ship of which Paul's father had been captain, and could tell priceless
