"What do _you_ know about your uncle?"

"Oh, I'd seen him a few times, though I'd never been up to Ashley. As long as Grandfather was alive and the mill at Adams Center was running, Uncle Burton used to go there to see his father, and I always used to be hanging around Grandfather and the mill, and the woods. I was crazy about it all, as a boy, used to work right along with the mill-hands, and out chopping with the lumbermen. Maybe Uncle Burton noticed that."

He was struck with a sudden idea, "By George, maybe _that_ was why he left me the mill!" He cast his eye retrospectively on this idea and was silent for a moment, emerging from his meditation to say, wonderingly, "Well, it certainly is _queer_, how things come out, how one thing hangs on another. It's enough to addle your brains, to try to start to follow back all the ways things happen ... ways you'd never thought of as of the least importance."

"Your Uncle Burton was of some importance to _us_," she told him. "Miss Oldham at the _pension_ said that she had just met a new American, down from Genoa, and when I heard your name I said, 'Oh, I used to know an old Mr. Crittenden who ran a wood-working factory up in Vermont, where I used to visit an old cousin of mine,' and that was why Miss Oldham introduced us, that silly way, as cousins."

He said, pouncingly, "You're running on, inconsequently, just to divert my mind from asking you again who or what Toucle is."

"You can ask and ask all you like," she defied him, laughing. "I'm not going to tell you. I've got to have _some_ secrets from you, to keep up the traditions of self-respecting womanhood. And anyhow I couldn't tell you, because she is different from everything else. You'll see for yourself, when we get there. If she's still alive." She offered a compromise, "I'll tell you what. If she's dead, I'll sit down and tell you about her. If she's still alive, you'll find out. She's an Ashley inst.i.tution, Toucle is. As symbolic as the c.u.mean Sybil. I don't believe she'll be dead. I don't believe she'll _ever_ be dead."

"You've let the cat out of the bag enough so I've lost my interest in her," he professed. "I can make a guess that she's some old woman, and I bet you I won't see anything remarkable in her. Except that wild name.

Is it Miss Toucle, or Mrs. Toucle?"

The girl burst into laughter at this, foolish, light-hearted mirth which drenched the air all about her with the perfume of young gaiety. "Is it Miss Druid, or Mrs. Druid?" was all she would say.

She looked up at him, her eyes shining, and cried between her gusts of laughter, as if astonished, "Why, I do believe we are going to be happy together. I do believe it's going to be fun to live with you."

His appalled surprise that she had again fallen into the pit of incredulity was, this time, only half humorous. "For G.o.d's sake, what _did_ you think!"

She answered, reasonably, "Well, n.o.body ever is happy together, either in books or out of them. Of all the million, million love-affairs that have happened, does anybody ever claim any one to have been happy?"

His breath was taken away. He asked helplessly, "Well, why _are_ you marrying me?"

She replied very seriously, "Because I can't help myself, dear Neale.

Isn't that the only reason you're marrying me?"

He looked at her long, his nostrils quivering a little, gave a short exclamation which seemed to carry away all his impatience, and finally said, quietly enough, "Why, yes, of course, if that's the way you want to put it. You can say it in a thousand thousand different ways."

He added with a sudden fury, "And never one of them will come anywhere near expressing it. Look here, Marise, I don't believe you have the faintest, faintest idea how big this thing is. All these fool clever ways of talking about it ... they're just a screen set up in front of it, to my mind. It's enough sight bigger than just you or me, or happiness or unhappiness. It's the meaning of everything!"

She considered this thoughtfully. "I don't believe I really know what you mean," she said, "or anyhow that I _feel_ what you mean. I have had dreams sometimes, that I'm in something awfully big and irresistible like a great river, flowing somewhere; but I've never felt it in waking hours. I wish I could. It's lovely in dreams. You evidently do, even awake."

He said, confidently, "You will, later on."

She ventured, "You mean, maybe, that I'm so shaken up by the little surface waves, chopping back and forth, that I don't feel the big current."

"It's there. Whether you feel it or not," he made final answer to her doubt.

She murmured, "I wonder if there is anything in that silly, old-fashioned notion that men are stronger than women, and that women must lean on men's strength, to live?"

"Everybody's got to lean on his own strength, sooner or later," he told her with a touch of grimness.

"You just won't be romantic!" she cried admiringly.

"I really love you, Marise," he answered profoundly; and on this rock-like a.s.surance she sank down with a long breath of trust.

The sun was dipping into the sea now, emblazoning the sky with a last flaming half-circle of pure color, but the light had left the dusky edges of the world. Already the far mountains were dimmed, and the plain, pa.s.sing from one deep twilight color to another more somber, was quietly sinking into darkness as into the strong loving arms of ultimate dissolution.

The girl spoke in a dreamy twilight tone, "Neale dear, this is not a romantic idea ... honestly, I do wish we could both die right here and never go down to the plain any more. Don't you feel that? Not at all?"

His voice rang out, resonant and harsh as a bugle-note, "No, I do not, not at all, not for a single moment. I've too much ahead of me to feel that. And so have you!"

"There comes the cable-car, climbing up to get us," she said faintly.

"And we will go down from this high place of safety into that dark plain, and we will have to cross it, painfully, step by step. _Dare_ you promise me we will not lose our way?" she challenged him.

"I don't promise you anything about it," he answered, taking her hand in his. "Only I'm not a bit afraid of the plain, nor the way that's before us. Come along with me, and let's see what's there."

"Do you think you know where we are going, across that plain?" she asked him painfully; "even where we are to _try_ to go?"

"No, I don't know, now," he answered undismayed. "But I think we will know it as we go along because we will be together."

The darkness, folding itself like a velvet mantle about the far mountains, deepened, and her voice deepened with it. "Can you even promise that we won't lose each other there?" she asked somberly.

At this he suddenly took her into his arms, silently, bending his face to hers, his insistent eyes bringing hers up to meet his gaze. She could feel the strong throbbing of his heart all through her own body.

She clung to him as though she were drowning. And indeed she felt that she was. Life burst over them with a roar, a superb flooding tide on whose strong swelling bosom they felt themselves rising, rising illimitably.

The sun had now wholly set, leaving to darkness the old, old plain, soaked with humanity.

CHAPTER II

_INTERLUDE_

March 15, 1920.

8:30 A.M.

Marise fitted little Mark's cap down over his ears and b.u.t.toned his blue reefer coat close to his throat.

"Now you big children," she said, with an anxious accent, to Paul and Elly standing with their school-books done up in straps, "be sure to keep an eye on Mark at recess-time. Don't let him run and get all hot and then sit down in the wind without his coat. Remember, it's his first day at school, and he's only six."

She kissed his round, smooth, rosy cheek once more, and let him go. Elly stooped and took her little brother's mittened hand in hers. She said nothing, but her look on the little boy's face was loving and maternal.

Paul a.s.sured his mother seriously, "Oh, I'll look out for Mark, all right."

Mark wriggled and said, "_I_ can looken out for myself wivout Paul!"

Their mother looked for a moment deep into the eyes of her older son, so clear, so quiet, so unchanging and true. "You're a good boy, Paul, a real comfort," she told him.

To herself she thought, "Yes, all his life he'll look out for people and get no thanks for it."