"I shall always want you," he said. "Only--you will never come back."
It had not occurred to either of them that this coming back, so tragically
considered, was dependent on an entirely problematical going away.
Nothing, that early summer night, seemed more unlikely than that Sidney
would ever be free to live her own life. The Street, stretching away to
the north and to the south in two lines of houses that seemed to meet in
the distance, hemmed her in. She had been born in the little brick house,
and, as she was of it, so it was of her. Her hands had smoothed and
painted the pine floors; her hands had put up the twine on which the
morning-glories in the yard covered the fences; had, indeed, with what
agonies of slacking lime and adding blueing, whitewashed the fence itself!
"She's capable," Aunt Harriet had grumblingly admitted, watching from her
sewing-machine Sidney's strong young arms at this humble spring task.
"She's wonderful!" her mother had said, as she bent over her hand work.
She was not strong enough to run the sewing-machine.
So Joe Drummond stood on the pavement and saw his dream of taking Sidney in
his arms fade into an indefinite futurity.
"I'm not going to give you up," he said doggedly. "When you come back,
I'll be waiting."
The shock being over, and things only postponed, he dramatized his grief a
trifle, thrust his hands savagely into his pockets, and scowled down the
Street. In the line of his vision, his quick eye caught a tiny moving
shadow, lost it, found it again.
"Great Scott! There goes Reginald!" he cried, and ran after the shadow.
"Watch for the McKees' cat!"
Sidney was running by that time; they were gaining. Their quarry, a
four-inch chipmunk, hesitated, gave a protesting squeak, and was caught in
Sidney's hand.
"You wretch!" she cried. "You miserable little beast--with cats
everywhere, and not a nut for miles!"
"That reminds me,"--Joe put a hand into his pocket,--"I brought some
chestnuts for him, and forgot them. Here."
Reginald's escape had rather knocked the tragedy out of the evening. True,
Sidney would not marry him for years, but she had practically promised to
sometime. And when one is twenty-one, and it is a summer night, and life
stretches eternities ahead, what are a few years more or less?
Sidney was holding the tiny squirrel in warm, protecting hands. She smiled
up at the boy.
"Good-night, Joe."