"I didn't know," he said. "I hadn't seen her. How should I know she was like you? How should I know if he lost her he mightn't be making a mistake? Yes, they're engaged. I sha'n't be at the wedding. I'm going abroad, but I shall send my blessing. To you, too, Ellen. Good-by. G.o.d bless you."

Then he had walked out of the hall, as alien, with his middle-aged robustness, as the mortal in fairy revelry; and Ellen, knowing her towns-people were looking at her in kindly interest, stood with dignity and yet a curious new consciousness of treasured happiness, as if she had a secret to think over, and a solving of perplexities.

Isabel Martin dropped out of her place, where she had been talking with Andrew Hall, and, forgetting in her haste the consistency of her part, ran over to her. Isabel, out of her abiding mischief, had dressed herself for a dullard's part. She had thought at first of being an old witch-woman and telling fortunes, but instead she had put on pious black alpaca and a portentous cap, and dropped her darting glances. To Andrew Hall, who was a portly Quaker in the dress of uncle Ephraim long since dead, she seemed as sweet as girlhood and as restful as his own mother.

Andrew had been her servitor for almost as many years as they had lived; but she had so flouted him, so called upon him for impossible chivalries, out of the wantonness of her fancy, that he had sometimes confided to himself, in the darkest of nights when he woke to think of her, that Isabel Martin was enough to make you hang yourself, and he wished he never had set eyes on her. Yet she was the major part of his life, and Andrew knew it. Now he followed her more slowly, and was by at the instant of her saying,--

"O Ellen, you couldn't go over across the orchard, could you, an' see if Maggie L.'s got the water boilin' for the coffee? I'm 'most afraid to go alone."

Ellen, waking from her dream, looked at her and smiled. She knew Isabel's tender purposes. This was meant to take her away from curious though tolerant eyes and give her a moment to wipe out the world of dreaming for the world of men.

"No," she said softly. "You don't need to."

"You let me go," said Andrew gallantly. "I can see if it's bilin' an'

come back an' tell ye."

"You!" said Isabel, abjuring her disguise, to rally him. "You'd be afraid. Come, Ellen."

She linked an arm in Ellen's, and falling at once into her part of sober age, paced with her from the hall. Andrew, constrained in a way he hardly understood himself, was following them, but in their woman's community of silent understanding they took no notice of him. Outside, the night was soft and welcoming, unreal after the light and color, an enchanted wilderness of moonlight splendor. They had crossed the road to the bench under the old poplar, and there Ellen sat down and drew a breath of excitement and gladness to be free to think. The moonlight seemed still brighter, sifting down the sky-s.p.a.ces, and the two women together looked up at it through the poplar branches and were exalted by that inexplicable sense of the certainty that things come true.

Dreams--that was what their minds were seeking pa.s.sionately--and dreams come true.

"Ain't it wonderful?" Isabel asked softly.

"Yes," said Ellen, in the same hushed tone, "it's wonderful."

"I'll leave you here by yourself an' run acrost the orchard," said Isabel, in her other careless voice. "When I come back, I'll stop here an' we'll go in together. Why, Andrew, you here?"

"You said you was afraid," he answered. "I'll go acrost with you."

"All right," said Isabel, with her kindest laugh, not the teasing one that made him hate her while he thought how bright and dear she was.

"Come take gran'ma acrost the orchard. Don't let anything happen to her."

They stepped over the wall and made their way along the little path by the grape arbor. The fragrance of fruit was sweet, and the world seemed filled with it.

"It's a pretty time o' year," said Andrew tremblingly.

"Yes."

"A kind of a time same 's this is to-night makes it seem as if life was pretty short. Be past before you know it."

"Yes."

She, too, spoke tremulously, and his heart went out to her.

"O Isabel," he said, "when you're like this, same as you are to-night, there ain't a livin' creatur' that's as nice as you be."

Isabel laughed. It was an echo of her flouting laugh, yet there was a little catch in the middle of it.

"There!" he said, with discontentment. "Now you're just as you be half the time, an' I could shake you for it. Sometimes seems to me I could kill you."

"Why don't you?" Isabel asked him, softly yet teasingly too, in a way that suddenly made her dearer. "If you don't see no use o' my livin', why don't you kill me?"

"What you cryin' for?" Andrew besought her, in an agony of trouble. "O Isabel, what you cryin' for?"

"I ain't cryin'," she said, "but if I am I guess it's for Ellen Bayliss, an' things--" She had never heard of "the tears of mortal things," and so she could not tell him.

"Ellen Bayliss? What's the matter of Ellen Bayliss?"

"Oh, she gets tired so quick, that's all."

"Don't you get tired," said Andrew. "Don't you let anything happen to you. O Isabel!"

The moonlight and the fragrance and old love constrained them, and they had kissed each other, and each knew they were to live together now, and sharpness would be put away perhaps; or, if it were not quite, Andrew would understand, knowing other things, too, and smile at it.

When they went back to the bench Ellen was gone, but in the hall they found her dancing with Clyde, and almost, it seemed, clad in the flying mantle of her youth.

"It's Virginny reel," cried Andrew, the infection of the night upon him.

"There's another set here. Come."

"Wait a minute," said Isabel, her hand upon his arm. "Look at the platform. Where's the old folks gone?"

The platform was deserted. The old folks, too, were dancing. Martha Waterman caught the recognition of it in Isabel's eyes, pointed at the empty seats of eld, and nodded gayly. She sped out of her place and, losing no step, danced up to Isabel and Andrew.

"I dunno which's the youngest, old or young," she cried, "nor they don't either. We're goin' to have some country dancin' an' then serve the coffee an' sing 'Auld Lang Syne,' an' it's my opinion we sha'n't be home 'fore two o'clock. Ain't it just grand!"

A POETESS IN SPRING

Jerry Freelands felt that the day was not suitably ended if, after tidying up the kitchen and practicing "The Harp That Once" and "Oft in the Stilly Night" on his fiddle, he did not go across the fields to Marietta Martin's and compare the moment's mood with her, either in the porch or at her fireside, according to the season. They lived, each alone, in a stretch of meadow land just off the main road, and n.o.body knew how many of their evenings they spent together, or, at this middle stage in their lives, would have drawn romantic conclusions if the tale of them had been told.

In his youth Jerry had been a solitary, given to wandering "by the river's brim," as he liked to say, thinking of poetry and his fiddle.

Marietta, even at that time, had been learning tailoring to support her mother, and she looked upon Jerry with unstinted admiration as too distinctly set apart by high attainments ever to be considered a common earthly swain. But Jerry did all his duties as if he were not gifted. He carried on the small farm, and, after his sister married and went away, nursed his mother until her death--"as handy as a woman," so the neighbors said. Yet he knew that all this tribute to the lower life was only something mysteriously decreed, perhaps to ballast the soul lest it soar too high. The real things were fiddle-playing and writing verse, sometimes inspired by nature and again by love or death, and publishing it in the county paper. Jerry had one consolation, one delight, besides and above Marietta. This was the poetess, Ruth Bellair, and it was of her he was thinking as he crossed the field, this darkening twilight, to Marietta's house. There was a warm spring wind, and frogs were peeping.

Jerry knew, although it was too dark to see, that down by the brook the procession of willows walked in a mist of green. It was a broken sky, with here and there a star between soft wafts of cloud, and the newness and beauty of the time smote upon him as he hurried on, and made him young again. He walked faster than usual, a tall, lightly moving figure, his head under his soft felt hat thrown forward and his loose hair blown back by the swiftness of his going. Time seemed to have fallen away from him at the call of some new antic.i.p.ation. He was not a man nearing fifty as the morning's sun had found him, but a youth with the mountain-top splendidly near and the rising sun to light his steps.

Marietta lived in a little, low-browed, gambrel-roofed house, with a vegetable garden in the back, a flower garden in front, and an orchard at the west side. She had sold the adjoining meadows and also the woodland, because she said it was better to lessen care as you grew older, and she was a poor hand to keep up a farm. Marietta was of those who are perhaps not calm by inheritance, but who have attained serenity because life proves it to be desirable. To-night she saw Jerry coming and met him at the door, a plump, fresh-colored woman with sweet brows, thick white hair, and blue eyes full of a wistful sympathy. She was younger than he, yet her acquired calmness had given her a matronly air and made her the one to a.s.sume protection and a gentle way of giving. As she stood there in the doorway, lamp in hand, she looked like a benignant mother waiting to greet a returning child.

"Well, Marietta," said Jerry.

He stopped a moment before her on the doorstone and drew the quick breath of the haste of his coming. Then he took off his hat, stayed for one look at the night behind him, and followed her in. Marietta put the lamp on the high mantel, and moved his chair slightly nearer the hearth.

There was no fire, but the act seemed to make him more intimately welcome. Then she seated herself on the sofa between the two side windows and folded her hands for an evening's intercourse. Jerry took out his pipe, held it absently for a moment, and laid it down on the table. Marietta hardly liked that. He must be moved indeed, she knew, if he meant to forego his evening smoke. Jerry sat forward a little in his chair and let his long hands, loosely clasped, hang between his knees.

He gazed straight out through the dark window as if he could see the lovely night pulsating there, and his bright gray eyes seemed to hold gleams of an extreme antic.i.p.ation. Then he remembered the world where he found himself, this clean exquisite room with its homely furnishings, where he had become as familiar as if it were a secondary sh.e.l.l that fitted him so completely he hardly noticed it, and turned to her with an effect of winking his eyes open after a dream.

"Marietta," said he, "who do you suppose has come?"

She shook her head in an attentive interest.

He kept his gaze on her as if it were all incredible.