They walked slowly back along the pike toward the brick house. The white-

ruffed fennel reached up its dusty yellow heads to touch her skirts as she

passed, and then drooped, satisfied, against the purple iron-weed at the

roadside. In the noonday silence no cricket chirped nor locust raised its

lorn monotone; the tree shadows mottled the road with blue, and the level

fields seemed to pant out a dazzling breath, the transparent "heat-waves"

that danced above the low corn and green wheat.

He was stooping very much as they walked; he wanted to be told that he

could look at her for a thousand years. Her face was rarely and

exquisitely modelled, but, perhaps, just now the salient characteristic of

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her beauty (for the salient characteristic seemed to be a different thing

at different times) was the coloring, a delicate glow under the white

skin, that bewitched him in its seeming a reflection of the rich

benediction of the noonday sun that blazed overhead.

Once he had thought the way to the Briscoe homestead rather a long walk;

but now the distance sped malignantly; and strolled they never so slow, it

was less than a "young bird's flutter from a wood." With her acquiescence

he rolled a cigarette, and she began to hum lightly the air of a song, a

song of an ineffably gentle, slow movement.

That, and a reference of the morning, and, perhaps, the smell of his

tobacco mingling with the fragrance of her roses, awoke again the keen

reminiscence of the previous night within him. Clearly outlined before him

rose the high, green slopes and cool cliff-walls of the coast of Maine,

while his old self lazily watched the sharp little waves through half-

closed lids, the pale smoke of his cigarette blowing out under the rail of

a waxen deck where he lay cushioned. And again a woman pelted his face

with handfuls of rose-petals and cried: "Up lad and at 'em! Yonder is

Winter Harbor." Again he sat in the oak-raftered Casino, breathless with

pleasure, and heard a young girl sing the "Angel's Serenade," a young girl

who looked so bravely unconscious of the big, hushed crowd that listened,

looked so pure and bright and gentle and good, that he had spoken of her

as "Sir Galahad's little sister." He recollected he had been much taken

with this child; but he had not thought of her from that time to this, he

supposed; had almost forgotten her. No! Her face suddenly stood out to his

view as though he saw her with his physical eye--a sweet and vivacious

child's face with light-brown hair and gray eyes and a short upper lip.

. . . And the voice. . . .




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