"Thank you. Austin--you and Sally will have to help me shop when I get to New York--Heaven knows what I can wear to travel down in."

Austin stopped raking, and flung himself down on the gra.s.s beside her.

"Sylvia," he said quickly, "I'm awfully sorry, but I can't go."

"Can't go! Why not?" she exclaimed, with so much disappointment in her voice that he was amazed.

"Father's a selectman now, you know, and away all day just at this time on town business. There's too much farmwork for Thomas and Peter to manage alone. I didn't foresee this, of course, when I accepted your uncle's invitation. I can't tell you how much it means to me to give it up, but you must see that I've got to."

"Yes, I see," she said gravely, and sat silently for some minutes, fingering the frill on her sleeve. Then she went on: "Uncle Mat wants me to stay a month or six weeks with him, and I think I ought to, after.

deserting him for so long. When I come back, my own little house will be ready for me, and it will be warm enough for me to move in there, so I think these last few days will be 'good-bye.' Your family has let me stay a year--the happiest year of all my life--and I know your mother loves me--almost as much as I love her--and hates to have me go. But all families are better off by themselves, and in one way I think I've stayed too long already."

"You mean Thomas?"

She nodded, her eyes full of tears. "I ought to have gone before it happened," she said penitently; "any woman with a grain of sense can usually see that--that sort of thing coming, and ward it off beforehand.

But I didn't think he was quite so serious, or expect it quite so soon."

"The young donkey! To annoy you so!"

"_Annoy_ me! Surely you don't think _Thomas_ was thinking of the money?"

"Good Lord, no, it never entered his head! Neither did it enter his head what an unpardonable piece of presumption it was on his part to ask you to marry him. A great, ignorant, overgrown, farmer boy!"

"You are mistaken," said Sylvia quietly; "I do not love Thomas, but if I did, the answer would have had to be 'no' just the same. The presumption would be all on my part, if I allowed any clean, wholesome, honest boy, in a moment of pa.s.sion, to throw away his life on a woman like me. Thomas must marry a girl, as fresh as he is himself--not a woman with a past like mine behind her."

For nearly a year Austin had exercised a good deal of self-control for a man little trained in that valuable quality. At Sylvia's speech it gave way suddenly, and without warning. Entirely forgetting his resolution never to touch her, he leaned forward, seizing her arm, and speaking vehemently.

"I wish you would get rid of your false, gloomy thoughts about yourself as easily as you have got rid of your false, gloomy clothing," he said, pa.s.sionately. "The mother and husband who made your life what it was are both where they can never hurt you again. Your character they never did touch, except in the most superficial way. When you told me your story, that night in the woods, you tried to make me think that you did voluntarily--what you did. You lied to me. I thought so then. I know it now. You were flattered and bullied, cajoled and coerced--a girl scarcely older than my sister Edith, whom we consider a child, whose father is distressed to even think of her as marriageable. It is time to stop feeling repentance for sins you never committed, and to look at yourself sanely and happily--if you must be introspective at all. No braver, lovelier, purer woman ever lived, or one more obviously intended to be a wife and mother. The sooner you become both, the better."

There was a moment of tense silence. Sylvia made no effort to draw away from him; at last she asked, in a voice which was almost pleading in its quality:

"Is that what you think of me?"

Austin dropped his hand. "Good G.o.d, Sylvia!" he said hoa.r.s.ely; "don't you know by this time what I think of you?"

"Then you mean--that you want me to marry you?"

"No, no, no!" he cried. "Why are you so bound to misunderstand and misjudge me? I beg you not to ride by yourself, and you tell me I am 'dictating.' I go for months without hearing from you for fear of annoying you, and you accuse me of 'indifference.' I bring you a gift as a va.s.sal might have done to his liege lady--and you shrink away from me in terror. I try to show you what manner of woman you really are, and you believe that I am displaying the same presumption which I have just condemned in my own brother. Are you so warped and embittered by one experience--a horrible one, but, thank Heaven, quickly and safely over with!--that you cannot believe me when I tell you that the best part of a decent man's love is not pa.s.sion, but reverence? His greatest desire, not possession, but protection? His ultimate aim, not gratification, but sacrifice?"

He bent over her. She was sitting quite motionless, her head bowed, her face hidden in her hands; she was trembling from head to foot. He put his arm around her.

"Don't!" he said, his voice breaking; "don't, Sylvia. I've been rough and violent--lost my grip on myself--but it's all over now--I give you my word of honor that it is. Please lift your head up, and tell me that you forgive me!" He waited until it seemed as if his very reason would leave him if she did not answer him; then at last she dropped her hands, and raised her head. The moon shone full on her upturned face, and the look that Austin saw there was not one of forgiveness, but of something so much greater that he caught his breath before she moved or spoke to him.

"Are you blind?" she whispered. "Can't you see how I have felt--since Christmas night, even if you couldn't long before that? Don't you know why I just couldn't go away? But I thought you didn't care for me--that you couldn't possibly have kept away from me so long if you did--that you thought I wasn't good enough--Oh, my dear, my dear--" She laid both hands on his shoulders.

The next instant she was in his arms, his lips against hers, all the sorrow and bitterness of their lives lost forever in the glory of their first kiss.

CHAPTER XII

When, two days later, Sylvia and Sally left for New York, none of the Grays had been told, much less had they suspected, what had happened. A certain new shyness, which Austin found very attractive, had come over Sylvia, and she seemed to wish to keep their engagement a secret for a time, and also to keep to her plan of going away, with the added reason that she now "wanted a chance to think things over."

"To think whether you really love me?" asked Austin gravely.

"Haven't I convinced you that I don't need to think that over any more?"

she said, with a look and a blush that expressed so much that the conversation was near to being abruptly ended.

Austin controlled himself, however, and merely said:

"I'm going down to our little cemetery this afternoon to put it in good order for the spring; I know you've always said you didn't want to go there, but perhaps you'll feel differently now. All the Grays are buried there, and no one else, and in spite of all the other things we've neglected, we've kept that as it should be kept; and it's so peaceful and pretty--always shady in summer, when it's hot, and sheltered in winter, when it's cold! I thought you could take a blanket and a book, and sit and read while I worked. Afterwards we can walk over to your house if you like--you may want to give me some final directions about the work that's to be done there while you're gone."

"I'd love to go to the cemetery--or anywhere else, for that matter--with you," said Sylvia, "and afterwards--to _our_ house. Perhaps you'll want to give some directions yourself!"

The tiny graveyard lay in the hollow of one of the wooded slopes which broke the great, undulating meadow which stretched from the Homestead to the river, a wall made of the stones picked up on the place around it, a plain granite shaft erected by the first Gray in the centre, and grouped about the shaft the quaint tablets of the century before, with old-fashioned names spelled in an old-fashioned manner, and with homely rhymes and trite sayings underneath; farther off, the newer gravestones, more ornate and less appealing. The elms were just beginning to bud, and the cold April wind whistled through them, but the pines were as green and sheltering as always, and Sylvia spread her blanket under one of them, and worked away at the sewing she had brought instead of a book, while Austin burned the gra.s.s and dug and pruned, whistling under his breath all the time. He stopped once to call her attention to a robin, the first they had seen that spring, and finally, when the sacred little place was in perfect order, came with a handful of trailing arbutus for her, and sat down beside her.

"I thought I remembered seeing some of this on the bank," he said; "it's always grown there--will you take it for your 'bouquet des fiancailles,'

Sylvia? I remember how surprised we all were last year because you liked the little wild flowers best, and went around searching for them, when your rooms were full of carnations and hothouse roses. And because you used to go out to walk, just to see the sunsets. Do you still love sunsets, too?"

"Yes, more than ever. In the fall while you were gone, I used to go down to the river nearly every afternoon, and watch the color spread over the fields. There's something about a sunset in the late autumn that's unlike those at any other time of year--have you ever noticed? It's not rosy, but a deep, deep golden yellow--spreading over the dull, bare earth like the glory from the diadem of a saint--one of those gray Fathers of early Italy, for instance."

"I know what you mean--but they seem to me more like the glory that comes into any dull, bare life," said Austin,--"the kind of glory you've been to me. It worries me to hear you say you want to go away to 'think things over.' What is there to think over--if you're sure you care?"

"There are lots of details to a thing of this sort."

"A thing of what sort?"

"Oh, Austin, how stupid you are! A--a marriage, of course."

"I thought all that was necessary were two willing victims, a license, and a parson."

"Well, there's a good deal more to it than that. Besides, your family would surely guess if I stayed here. I want to keep it just to ourselves for a little while."

"I see. It's all right, dear. Take all the time you want."

"What would you tell them, anyway?" she went on lightly,--"that I proposed to you, and that you accepted me? Or, to be more exact, that you didn't accept me, but said, 'No, no, no!' most decidedly, and went on repeating it, with variations, until I threw myself into your arms? It was an awful blow to my pride--considering that heretofore I've certainly had my fair share of attention, and even a little more than that--to have to do _all_ the love-making, and I'm certainly not going to go brag about it--' This time the conversation really did get interrupted, for Austin would not for one instant submit to such a "garbling of statistics" and took the quickest means in his power to put an end to it."

He had the wisdom, however, greater, perhaps, than might have been expected, not to oppose any of her wishes just then, and it was Sylvia herself who at the last minute felt her heart beginning to fail her, and called him to the farther end of the station platform, on the pretext of consulting him about some baggage.

"I don't see how I can say good-bye--in just an ordinary way," she whispered, "and I'm beginning to miss you dreadfully already. If I can't stand it, away from you, you must arrange to come down for at least a day or two."

It was beginning to sprinkle, and, taking her umbrella, he opened it and handed it to her, leaning forward and kissing her as soon as she was hidden by it.

"I never meant to say good-bye 'in an ordinary way,'" he said cheerfully, "whatever your intentions were! And, of course, I'll manage to come to town for a day or two, if you find you really want me. Fred would be glad to help me out for that long, I'm sure. On the other hand, if it's a relief to be rid of me for a while, and New York looks pretty good to you, don't hurry back--you've been away for a whole year, remember. I'll understand."

In spite of his cheerful words and matter-of-course manner, Austin stood watching the train go out with a heavy heart. He was very sincere in feeling that his presumption had been great, and that he had taken advantage of feelings which mere youth and loneliness might have awakened in Sylvia, and from which she would recover as soon as she was with her own friends again. And yet he loved her so dearly that it was hard--even though he acknowledged that it was best--to let her go back to the world by whose standards he felt he fell short in every way.