Molly turned a glowing, quivering face of pride on Sylvia, and then looked past her shoulder with a startled expression into the eyes of one of the fire-fighters, a tall, lean, stooping man, blackened and briar-torn like the rest. "Why, Cousin Austin!" she cried with vehement surprise, "what in the world--" In spite of his grime, she gave him a hearty, astonished, affectionate kiss.

"I was just wondering," said the man, smiling indulgently down on her, "how soon you'd recognize me, you little scatter-brain."

"I thought you were going to stick in Colorado all summer," said Molly.

"Well, I heard they were short of help at Austin Farm and I came on to help get in the hay," said the man. Both he and Molly seemed to consider this a humorous speech. Then, remembering Sylvia, Molly went through a casual introduction. "This is my cousin--Austin Page--my _favorite_ cousin! He's really awfully nice, though so plain to look at." She went on, still astonished, "But how'd you get _here?_"

"Why, how does anybody in Vermont get to a forest fire?" he answered.

"We were out in the hayfield, saw the smoke, left the horses, grabbed what tools we could find, and beat it through the woods. That's the technique of the game up here."

"I didn't know your farm ran anywhere near here," said Molly.

"It isn't so terribly near. We came across lots tolerable fast. But there's a little field, back up on the edge of the woods that isn't so far. Grandfather used to raise potatoes there. I've got it into hay now," he explained.

As they talked, the fire beyond them gave definite signs of yielding.

It had evidently been stopped on the far side and now advanced nowhere, showed no longer a malign yellow crest, but only rolling sullenly heavenward a diminishing cloud of smoke. The fire-fighters began to straggle back across the burned tract towards the road, their eyeb.a.l.l.s gleaming white in their dark faces.

"Oh, they mustn't walk! I'll take them back--the darlings!" said Molly, starting for her car. She was quite her usual brisk, free-and-easy self now. "Cracky! I hope I've got gas enough. I've certainly been going _some!_"

"Why don't you leave me here?" suggested Sylvia. "I'll walk home.

That'll leave room for one more."

"Oh, you can't do that!" protested Molly faintly, though she was evidently at once struck with the plan. "How'd you find your way home?" She turned to her cousin. "See here, Austin, why don't _you_ take Sylvia home? You ought to go anyhow and see Grandfather. h.e.l.l be awfully hurt to think you're here and haven't been to see him." She threw instantly into this just conceived idea the force which always carried through her plans. "Do go! I feel so grateful to these men I don't want one of them to walk a step!"

Sylvia had thought of a solitary walk, longing intensely for isolation, and she did not at all welcome the suggestion of adapting herself to a stranger. The stranger, on his part, looked a very unchivalrous hesitation; but this proved to be only a doubt of Sylvia's capacity as a walker.

"If you don't mind climbing a bit, I can take you over the gap between Hemlock and Windward Mountain and make a bee-line for Lydford. It's not an hour from here, that way, but it's ten miles around by the road--and hot and dusty too."

"Can she _climb_!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Molly scornfully, impatient to be off with her men. "She went up to Prospect Rock in forty minutes."

She high-handedly a.s.sumed that everything was settled as she wished it, and running towards the car, called with an easy geniality to the group of men, starting down the road on foot, "Here, wait a minute, folks, I'll take you back!"

She mounted the car, started the engine, waved her hand to the two behind her, and was off.

The lean, stooping man looked dubiously at Sylvia. "You're sure you don't mind a little climb?" he said.

"Oh no, I like it," she said listlessly. The moment for her was of stale, wearied return to real life, to the actual world which she was continually finding uglier than she hoped. The recollection of Felix Morrison came back to her in a bitter tide.

"All ready?" asked her companion, mopping his forehead with a very dirty handkerchief.

"All ready," she said and turned, with a hanging head, to follow him.

CHAPTER XXVII

BETWEEN WINDWARD AND HEMLOCK MOUNTAINS

For a time as they plodded up the steep wood-road, overgrown with ferns and rank gra.s.s, with dense green walls of beech and oak saplings on either side, what few desultory remarks they exchanged related to Molly, she being literally the only topic of common knowledge between them. Sylvia, automatically responding to her deep-lying impulse to give pleasure, to be pleasing, made an effort to overcome her somber la.s.situde and spoke of Molly's miraculous competence in dealing with the fire. Her companion said that of course Molly hadn't made all that up out of her head on the spur of the moment. After spending every summer of her life in Lydford, it would be surprising if so energetic a child as Molly hadn't a.s.similated the Vermont formula for fighting fire. "They always put for the nearest factory and get all hands out,"

he explained, adding meditatively, as he chewed on a twig: "All the same, the incident shows what I've always maintained about Molly: that she is, like 'most everybody, lamentably miscast. Molly's spirit oughtn't to have taken up its abiding place in that highly ornamental blond sh.e.l.l, condemned after a fashionable girl's education to pendulum swings between Paris and New York and Lydford. It doesn't fit for a cent. It ought to have for habitation a big, gaunt, powerful man's body, and for occupation the running of a big factory." He seemed to be philosophizing more to himself than to Sylvia, and beyond a surprised look into his extremely grimy face, she made no comment.

She had taken for granted from the talk between him and Molly that he was one of the "forceful, impossible Montgomery cousins," and had cast her own first remarks in a tone calculated to fit in with the supposit.i.tious dialect of such a person. But his voice, his intonations, and his whimsical idea about Molly fitted in with the conception of an "impossible" as little as with the actual visible facts of his ragged shirt-sleeves and faded, earth-stained overalls.

They toiled upwards in silence for some moments, the man still chewing on his birch-twig. He noticed her sidelong half-satirical glance at it. "Don't you want one?" he asked, and gravely cut a long, slim rod from one of the saplings in the green wall shutting them into the road. As he gave it to her he explained, "It's the kind they make birch beer of. You nip off the bark with your teeth. You'll like it."

Still more at sea as to what sort of person he might be, and now fearing perhaps to wound him if he should turn out to be a very unsophisticated one, Sylvia obediently set her teeth to the l.u.s.trous, dark bark and tore off a bit, which gave out in her mouth a mild, pleasant aromatic tang, woodsy and penetrating, unlike any other taste she knew. "Good, isn't it?" said her companion simply.

She nodded, slowly awakening to a tepid curiosity about the individual who strode beside her, lanky and powerful in his blue jeans. What an odd circ.u.mstance, her trudging off through the woods thus with a guide of whom she knew nothing except that he was Molly Sommerville's cousin and worked a Vermont farm--and had certainly the dirtiest face she had ever seen, with the exception of the coal-blackened stokers in the power-house of the University. He spoke again, as though in answer to what might naturally be in her mind: "At the top of the road it crosses a brook, and I think a wash would be possible. I've a bit of soap in my pocket that'll help--though it takes quite a lot of scrubbing to get off fire-fighting grime." He looked pointedly down at her as he talked.

Sylvia was so astonished that she dropped back through years of carefully acquired self-consciousness into a moment of the stark simplicity of childhood. "Why--is _my_ face dirty?" she cried out.

The man beside her apparently found the contrast between her looks and the heartfelt sincerity of her question too much for him. He burst into helpless laughter, though he was adroit enough to thrust forward as a pretext, "The picture of my _own_ grime that I get from your accent is tremendous!" But it was evidently not at his own joke that he was laughing.

For an instant Sylvia hung poised very near to extreme annoyance.

Never since she had been grown up, had she appeared at such an absurd disadvantage. But at once the mental picture of herself, making inaudible carping strictures on her companion's sootiness and, all unconscious, lifting to observe it a critical countenance as swart as his own--the incongruity smote her deliciously, irresistibly! Sore heart or not, black depression notwithstanding, she needs must laugh, and having laughed, laugh again, laugh louder and longer, and finally, like a child, laugh for the sake of laughing, till out through this unexpected channel she discharged much of the stagnant bitterness around her heart.

Her companion laughed with her. The still, sultry summer woods echoed with the sound. "How human, how lusciously _human_!" he exclaimed.

"Neither of us thought that _he_ might be the blackened one!"

"Oh, mine _can't_ be as bad as yours!" gasped out Sylvia, but when she rubbed a testing handkerchief on her cheek, she went off in fresh peals at the sight of the resultant black smears.

"Don't, for Heaven's sake, waste that handkerchief," cautioned her companion. "It's the only towel between us. Mine's impossible!" He showed her the murky rag which was his own; and as they spoke, they reached the top of the road, heard the sound of water, and stood beside the brook.

He stepped across it, in one stride of his long legs, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, took a book out of his pocket, laid it on a stone, and knelt down. "I choose this for _my_ wash-basin," he said, indicating a limpid pool paved with clean gray pebbles.

Sylvia answered in the same note of play, "This'll be mine." It lay at the foot of a tiny waterfall, plashing with a tinkling note into transparent shallows. She cast an idle glance on the book he had laid down and read its t.i.tle, "A History of the Inst.i.tution of Property,"

and reflected that she had been right in thinking it had a familiar-looking cover. She had dusted books with that sort of cover all her life.

Molly's cousin produced from his overalls a small piece of yellow kitchen-soap, which he broke into scrupulously exact halves and presented with a grave flourish to Sylvia. "Now, go to it," he exhorted her; "I bet I get a better wash than you."

Sylvia took off her hat, rolled up her sleeves, and began on vigorous ablutions. She had laughed, yes, and heartily, but in her complicated many-roomed heart a lively pique rubbed shoulders with her mirth, and her merriment was tinctured with a liberal amount of the traditional feminine horrified disgust at having been uncomely, at having unconsciously been subjected to an indignity. She was determined that no slightest stain should remain on her smooth, fine-textured skin.

She felt, as a pretty woman always feels, that her personality was indissolubly connected with her looks, and it was a symbolic act which she performed as she fiercely scrubbed her face with the yellow soap till its acrid pungency blotted out for her the woodland aroma of moist earth and green leaves. She dashed the cold water up on her cheeks till the spattering drops gleamed like crystals on the crisp waviness of her ruddy brown hair. She washed her hands and arms in the icy mountain water till they were red with the cold, hot though the day was. She was chilled, and raw with the crude astringency of the soap, but she felt cleansed to the marrow of her bones, as though there had been some mystic quality in this l.u.s.tration in running water, performed under the open sky. The racy, black-birch tang still lingering on her tongue was a flavor quite in harmony with this severely washed feeling. It was a taste notably clean.

She looked across the brook at her companion, now sitting back on his heels, and saw that there had emerged from his grime a thin, tanned, high-nosed face, topped by drab-colored hair of no great abundance and lighted by a pair of extraordinarily clear, gray eyes. She perceived no more in the face at that moment, because the man, as he looked up at her, became nothing but a dazzled mirror from which was reflected back to her the most flattering image of her own appearance. Almost actually she saw herself as she appeared to him, a wood-nymph, kneeling by the flowing water, vital, exquisite, strong, radiant in a cool flush, her uncovered hair gleaming in a thousand loosened waves.

Like most comely women of intelligence Sylvia was intimately familiar with every phase of her own looks, and she knew down to the last blood-corpuscle that she had never looked better. But almost at once came the stab that Felix Morrison was not the man who was looking at her, and the heartsick recollection that he would never again be there to see her. Her moment of honest joy in being lovely pa.s.sed. She stood up with a clouded face, soberly pulled down her sleeves, and picked up her hat.

"Oh, why don't you leave it off?" said the man across the brook.

"You'd be so much more comfortable!" She knew that he meant her hair was too pretty to cover, and did not care what he meant. "All right, I'll carry it," she a.s.sented indifferently.

He did not stir, gazing up at her frankly admiring. Sylvia made out, from the impression he evidently now had of her, that her face had really been very, very dirty; and at the recollection of that absurd ascent of the mountain by those two black-faced, twig-chewing individuals, a return of irrepressible laughter quivered on her lips.

Before his eyes, as swiftly, as unaccountably, as utterly as an April day shifts its moods, she had changed from radiant, rosy wood-G.o.ddess to saddened mortal and thence on into tricksy, laughing elf. He burst out on her, "Who _are_ you, anyhow?"

She remembered with a start. "Why, that's so, Molly didn't mention my name--isn't that like Molly! Why, I'm Sylvia Marshall,"

"You may be _named_ Sylvia Marshall!" he said, leaving an inference in the air like incense.

"Well, yes, to be sure," rejoined Sylvia; "I heard somebody only the other day say that an introduction was the quaintest of grotesques, since people's names are the most--"

He applied a label with precision. "Oh, you know Morrison?"