"Yes, do."

She was gone. I walked slowly back to my dwelling. I had kept my resolution. Yet how strangely I had kept it! What did it mean? Had I been strong? No. Had she made me keep it? Who could say? All had been so sudden--the kiss, her springing away, her abrupt, astonishing laughter. But she had not reproached me, she had not been righteously angry, nor, still less, absurd. She had thought it, perhaps, but the mood of the place and hour, and understood. That was fine, generous! Few women, I thought, would be capable of it. Stella! How pleasant it had been to say the name! Then the memory of her kiss came over me like a wave, and my supper stood neglected, and all that evening I sat staring idly at my ma.n.u.scripts and stroking Buster's head.

Yes, I had kept my resolution--and felt like a fool, a happy, hopeless fool!

Chapter XVI

I GO TO NEW YORK FOR A PURPOSE

I shall not here recount the events on the farm during the weeks which followed Miss Stella's departure. They did not particularly interest me.

My whole psychological make-up had been violently shaken, the centres of attention had been shifted, and I was constantly struggling for a readjustment which did not come. The post-office appealed to me more than the peas, and I laboured harder over my photographs of the sundial beds than over the beds themselves. I sent for a ray filter and a wide-angle lens, spending hours in experiment and covering a plank in front of the south door with printing frames.

I had written to her the day after she had departed, but no reply came for a week, and then only a brief little note, telling me it was hot in town and conveying her regards to the roses. I, too, waited a week--though it was hard--and then answered, sending some photographs, one of them a snapshot of a bird on the edge of the bath, one of them of Buster sitting on his hind legs. Again she answered briefly, merrily, conveying her especial regards to Buster, but ending with a plaintive little postscript about the heat.

I sat, the evening after this letter arrived, in my big, cool room, with Buster beside me, and thought of her down there in the swelter of town.

I wanted to answer her letter, and wanted to answer it tenderly. I was lonely in my great, cool room; I was unspeakably lonely.

Suddenly it occurred to me that this was the evening of Cla.s.s Day.

The Yard was full of lanterns, of music, of shimmering dresses, of pretty faces, of young men in mortar boards and gowns. I might have been sitting in the deep window recess of my old room above the Yard, drinking in the scene with the pleasant impersonal wistfulness of an older man in the presence of happy youth. But I wasn't. I was sitting here alone with Buster, thinking of a poor girl in a hot, lonely New York lodging-house. I pulled my pad toward me and wrote her a letter. It read:

Dear, Nice Lady: I'm lying here on the rug, my tail quite tired after a hard day's work, looking up in Mr. John's face. His face is kind of glum and his eyes sort of faraway looking. I don't know what's the matter with him. He's been that way nights for two or three weeks now, which makes me sad, too; only he goes to the post-office often, which makes me glad, 'cause I love to walk or to run behind the buggy, and there's a collie pup on the way who is very nice.

What do you suppose is the trouble? Sometimes he goes to the brook and sits on a stone by a pool there, while I go wading and get my stummick wet and drippy and cool. I wish you'd come back. I didn't get to know you so awful well, but I liked you, and a house with just one glum, stupid man in it ain't--I mean isn't--very nice, 'specially as Peter's still at school. Schools last awful late up here.

I am yours waggishly--

"Here, Buster," said I. The pup rose and snuggled his nose into my lap.

I picked him up, held his forepaw firmly and put some ink on it with the end of a match. Then I held the paper below it, pressed the paw down, and made a signature, wiping the paw afterward with a blotter. Buster enjoyed the strange operation, and wagged his tail furiously. I sealed and addressed the letter, and went to bed.

A few days later a box came addressed to Buster in my care. I opened it in Buster's presence, indeed literally beneath his nose. On top was a small package, tied with blue ribbon, and labelled "For Buster."

It proved to be a dog biscuit, which the recipient at once took to the hearth and began upon. Beneath this was a note, which I opened with eager fingers. It began:

DARLING BUSTER: Your waggish epistle received and contents noted. While most of us at times agree with him who said that the more he saw of men the better he liked dogs, nevertheless the canine intelligence is in some ways limited. Pray do not misunderstand me, dear Buster. In its limits lies its loyalty! No man is a hero to his valet, but every man to his dog. However, these same limits of the canine intelligence, which logic compels me to a.s.sume that you also possess, are probably responsible for your mistake in a.s.signing the term glumness to what you observe in Master John, when it is really lack of occupation. You see, dear Buster, he has got Twin Fires so far under way that he doesn't work at it all the time, so he ought to be at his writing of stories, made up of big dictionary words which I am defining or inventing for him down here in a very hot, dirty, dusty, smelly town. He isn't doing that, is he? Won't you please tell him to? Tell him that's all the trouble. He has a reaction from his first farming enthusiasm, and doesn't realize that the thing to do is to go to work on the new line, _his_ line. For it _is_ his line, you know, Buster.

Underneath this you'll find something to give him, with my best wishes for sunshine on the dear garden. I'd kiss you, Buster, only dogs are terribly germy.

Stella.

P.S. That _is_ a nice pool, isn't it?

I sat on the floor with the letter in my lap, smiling happily over it.

Then I took the last package out of the box. It was heavy, evidently metal. Removing the papers, I held in my hand an old bronze sundial plate, a round one to fit my column, and upon it, freshly engraved, the ancient motto--

Horas Non Numero Nisi Serenas

My first thought was of its cost. She couldn't afford it, the silly, generous girl! She'd bought it, doubtless, at one of those expensive New York antique shops, and then taken it to an engraver's, for further expense. I ought not accept it. Yet how could I refuse? I couldn't.

I hugged it to my heart, and fairly ran to the dial post, Buster at my heels. It was already nearly noon, so I set it on the pedestal, got a level and a pot of glue, which was the only means of securing it to the post which I had, and watch in hand waited for the minute of twelve.

At the minute, I set the shadow between the noon lines, levelled it with thin bits of match underneath, and glued it down. Then I stood off and surveyed it, sitting there in the sun--_her_ dial! Then I ran for my camera.

I developed the film at once, and made a print that afternoon. When it was made, I went out into the vegetable garden, on a sudden impulse to work off physical energy, took the wheel hoe away from Mike, and began to cultivate.

Did you ever spend an afternoon with a wheel hoe, up and down, up and down, between rows of beets and carrots and onions, between cauliflower plants and tomato vines, between pepper plants and lettuce? It requires a certain fixity of attention to keep the weeders or the cultivator teeth close to the plants without also injuring them. But there is a soothing monotony in the forward pushes of the machine, and a profound satisfaction in seeing the weeds come up, the ground grow clean and brown and broken on each side of the row behind you, and to feel, too, how much you are accomplishing with the aid of this comparatively simple tool.

My early peas were ready for market. Mike announced that he was going to take the first lot over in the morning. They had been planted very late, but fortune had favoured them, and now they were hardly more than a week behind Bert's, which had been planted early in April. The foot-high corn was waving in the breeze, the long rows of delicate onion tops, of beets, carrots, radishes, and lettuce plants were as characteristically different as the vegetables themselves. I fixed their characteristics in my vision. I suddenly found myself taking a renewed interest in the farm. As I paused to wipe my bronzed forehead or relight my pipe, I would raise my head and look back over the rows, or through the trellis aqueduct to the house, seeing the sundial telling the hours on the lawn, and think of Stella, think of her down in the hot city, where I knew at last that I should not let her stay.

Yes, I had no longer any doubts. I wanted her. I should always want her. Twin Fires was incomplete, I was incomplete, life was incomplete, without her. I pushed the hoe with redoubled zeal, long after Mike had milked the cows and departed.

At six I stopped, amazed to find the plot of a story in my head.

Heaven knows how it got there, but there it was, almost as full-statured as Minerva when she sprang from the head of Jove, though considerably less glacial. I even had the opening sentence all ready framed--to me always the most difficult point of story or essay, except the closing sentence. Nor did this tale appear to be one I had incubated in the past, and which now popped up above the "threshold" from my subconsciousness. It was a brand-new plot, a perfect stranger to me. The phenomenon interested me almost as much as the plot. The tale grew even clearer as I took my bath, and haunted me during supper, so that I was peremptory in my replies to poor Mrs. Pillig and refused to aid Peter that evening with his geography.

"To-morrow," said I, vaguely, going into my study and locking the door.

I worked all that evening, got up at midnight to forage for a gla.s.s of milk and a fresh supply of oil for my lamp, and returned to my desk to work till four, when the sun astonished me. The story was done! Instead of going to bed, I went down in the cool of the young morning, when only the birds were astir, and took my bath in Stella's pool. Then I went to the dew-drenched pea vines and began to pick peas.

Here Mike found me, with nearly half a bushel gathered, when he appeared early to pick for market.

"It's the early bird gets the peas," said I.

"It is shurely," he laughed. "You might say you had a tiliphone call to get up--only these ain't tiliphones."

"Mike!" I cried, "a pun before breakfast!"

"Shure, I've had me breakfast," said he.

Which reminded me that I hadn't. I went in the house to get it, reading over and correcting my ma.n.u.script as I ate. After breakfast I put on respectable clothes, tucked the ma.n.u.script in my pocket, and mounted the seat of my farm wagon, beside Mike. Behind us were almost two bushels of peas and several bunches of tall, juicy, red rhubarb stalks from the old hills we found on the place. Mike had greatly enriched the soil, and grown the plants in barrels.

"Well, I'm a real farmer now," said I.

"Ye are, shurely," Mike replied. "Them's good peas, if they was planted late."

We drove past the golf links and the summer hotel, to the market, where I was already known, I found, and greeted by name as I entered.

"I'll buy anything you'll sell me," said the proprietor, "and be glad to get it. Funny thing about this town, the way folks won't take the trouble to sell what they raise. Most of the big summer estates have their own gardens, of course, but there's nearly a hundred families that don't, and four boarding-houses, and the hotels. Why, the hotels send to New York for vegetables--if you can beat that! Guess all our farmers with any gumption have gone to the cities."

"Well," said I, "I'm not in farming for my health, which has always been good. I've got more than a bushel of peas out there."

"Peas!" cried the market man. "Why, I have more demands for peas than I can fill. The folks who could sell me peas won't plant 'em 'cause it's too much trouble or expense to provide the brush. I'll give you eight cents a quart for peas to-day."

"This is too easy," I whispered to Mike, as we went out to get the baskets.

I sold my rhubarb also, and came away with a little book in which there was entered to my credit $4.16 for peas and $1.66 for rhubarb. I put the book proudly in my pocket, for it represented my first earnings from the farm, and mounting the farm wagon again told Mike to drive me to the hotel.

As we pulled up before the veranda, the line of old ladies in rockers focussed their eyes upon us.

"Shure," whispered Mike, "they look like they was hung out to dry!"