The maid had not yet answered. Waiting in the still porch, winter everywhere beyond it, Carl was all excited antic.i.p.ation. He hastily pressed her hand, and she lightly returned the pressure, laughing, breathing quickly. They started like convicted lovers as the maid opened the door. The consciousness of their starting made them the more embarra.s.sed, and they stammered before the maid. Ruth fled up-stairs, while Carl tried to walk up gravely, though he was tingling with the game.

When he had washed (discovering, as every one newly discovers after every long, chilly walk, that water from the cold tap feels amazingly warm on hands congealed by the tramp), and was loitering in the upper hall, Ruth called to him from Mrs. Needham's room:

"I think you'll find hair-brushes and things in Jack's room, to the right. Oh, I am very stupid; I forgot this was our house; I mean in your room, of course."

He had a glimpse of her, twisting up a strand of naturally wavy brown hair, a silver-backed hair-brush bright against it, her cheeks flushed to an even crimson, her blue corduroy jacket off, and, warmly intimate in its stead, a blouse of blue satin, opening in a shallow triangle at her throat. With a tender big-brotherliness he sought the room that was his, not Jack's. No longer was this the house of Other People, but one in which he belonged.

"No," he heard himself explain, "she isn't beautiful. Istra Nash was nearer that. But, golly! she is such a good pal, and she is beautiful if an English lane is. Oh, stop rambling.... If I could kiss that little honey place at the base of her throat...."

"Yes, Miss Winslow. Coming. _Am_ I ready for dinner? Watch me!"

She confided as he came out into the hall, "Isn't it terribly confusing to have our home and even three toby-children all ready-made for us, this way!"

Her glance--eyes that always startled him with blue where dark-brown was expected; even teeth showing; head c.o.c.ked sidelong; cheeks burning with fire of December snow--her glance and all her manner trusted him, the outlaw. It was not as an outsider, but as her comrade that he answered:

"Golly! have we a family, too? I always forget. So sorry. But you know--get so busy at the office----"

"Why, I _think_ we have one. I'll go look in the nursery and make sure, but I'm almost positive----"

"No, I'll take your word for it. You're around the house more than I am.... But, oh, say, speaking of that, that reminds me: Woman, if you think that I'm going to buy you a washing-machine this year, when I've already bought you a napkin-ring and a portrait of Martha Washington----"

"_Oh weh!_ I knew I should have a cruel husband who----Joy! I think the maid is prowling about and trying to listen. 'Shhh! The story Laura will get out of her!"

While the maid served dinner, there could scarce have been a more severely correct pair, though Carl did step on her toe when she was saying to the maid, in her best offhand manner, "Oh, Leah, will you please tell Mrs. Needham that I stole a handkerchief from my--I mean from her room?"

But when the maid had been unable to find any more imaginary crumbs to brush off the table, and had left them alone with their hearts and the dessert, a most rowdy young "married couple" quarreled violently over the washing-machine he still refused to buy for her.

Carl insisted that, as suburbanites, they had to play cards, and he taught her pinochle, which he had learned from the bartender of the Bowery saloon. But the cards dropped from their fingers, and they sat before the gas-log in the living-room, in a lazy, perfect happiness, when she said:

"All the while we've been playing cards--and playing the still more dangerous game of being married--I've been thinking how glad I am to know about your life. Somehow----I wonder if you have told so very many?"

"Practically no one."

"I do----I'm really not fishing for compliments, but I do want to be found understanding----"

"There's never been any one so understanding."

Silent then. Carl glanced about the modern room. Ruth's eyes followed.

She nodded as he said:

"But it's really an old farm-house out in the hills where the snow is deep; and there's logs in the fireplace."

"Yes, and rag carpets."

"And, oh, Ruth, listen, a bob-sled with----Golly! I suppose it is a little premature to call you 'Ruth,' but after our being married all evening I don't see how I can call you 'Miss Winslow.'"

"No, I'm afraid it would scarcely be proper, under the circ.u.mstances.

Then I must be 'Mrs. Ericson.' Ooh! It makes me think of Norse galleys and northern seas. Of course--your galley was the aeroplane.... 'Mrs.

Eric----'" Her voice ran down; she flushed and said, defensively: "What time is it? I think we must be starting. I telephoned I would be home by ten." Her tone was conventional as her words.

But as they stood waiting for a trolley-car to the New York ferry, on a street corner transformed by an arc-light that swung in the wind and cast wavering films of radiance among the vague wintry trees of a wood-lot, Ruth tucked her arm under his, small beside his great ulster, and sighed like a child:

"I am ver-ee cold!"

He rubbed her hand protectingly, her mouselike hand in its fur-lined glove. His canny, self-defensive, Scotchlike Norse soul opened its gates. He knew a longing to give, a pa.s.sion to protect her, a whelming desire to have shy secrets with this slim girl. All the poetry in the world sounded its silver harps within him because his eyes were opened and it was given to him to see her face. Gently he said:

"Yes, it's cold, and there's big gray ghosts hiding there in the trees, with their leathery wings, that were made out of sea-fog by the witches, folded in front of them, and they're glumming at us over the bony, k.n.o.bly joints on top their wings, with big, round platter eyes.

And the wind is calling us--it's trying to s.n.a.t.c.h us out on the arctic snow-fields, to freeze us. But I'll fight them all off. I won't let them take you, Ruth."

"I'm sure you won't, Carl."

"And--oh--you won't let Phil Dunleavy keep you from running away, not for a while yet?"

"M-maybe not."

The sky had cleared. She tilted up her chin and adored the stars--stars like the hard, cold, fighting sparks that fly from a trolley-wire. Carl looked down fondly, noting how fair-skinned was her forehead in contrast to her thick, dark brows, as the arc-light's brilliance rested on her worshiping face--her lips a-tremble and slightly parted. She raised her arms, her fingers wide-spread, praising the star-G.o.ds. She cried only, "Oh, all this----" but it was a prayer to a greater G.o.d Pan, shaking his snow-incrusted beard to the roar of northern music. To Carl her cry seemed to pledge faith in the starred sky and the long trail and a glorious restlessness that by a dead fireplace of white, smooth marble would never find content.

"Like sword-points, those stars are," he said, then----

Then they heard the trolley-car's flat wheels grinding on a curve. Its search-light changed the shadow-haunted woodland to a sad group of scanty trees, huddling in front of an old bill-board, with its top broken and the tattered posters flapping. The wanderers stepped from the mystical romance of the open night into the exceeding realism of the car--highly realistic wooden floor with small, muddy pools from lumps of dirty melting snow, hot air, a smell of Italian workmen, a German conductor with the sniffles, a row of shoes mostly wet and all wrinkled. They had to stand. Most realistic of all, they read the glossy car-signs advertising soap and little cigars, and the enterprising local advertis.e.m.e.nt of "Wm. P. Smith & Sons, All Northern New Jersey Real Estate, Cheaper Than Rent." So, instantly, the children of the night turned into two sophisticated young New-Yorkers who, apologizing for fresh-air yawns, talked of the theatrical season.

But for a moment a strange look of distance dwelt in Ruth's eyes, and she said: "I wonder what I can do with the winter stars we've found?

Will Ninety-second Street be big enough for them?"

CHAPTER x.x.xII

For a week--the week before Christmas--Carl had seen neither Ruth nor Gertie; but of the office he had seen too much. They were "rushing work" on the Touricar to have it on the market early in 1913. Every afternoon or evening he left the office with his tongue scaly from too much nervous smoking; poked dully about the streets, not much desiring to go any place, nor to watch the crowds, after all the curiosity had been drawn out of him by hours of work. Several times he went to a super-movie, a cinema palace on Broadway above Seventy-second Street, with an entrance in New York Colonial architecture, and crowds of well-to-do Jewish girls in opera-cloaks.

On the two bright mornings of the week he wanted to play truant from the office, to be off with Ruth over the hills and far away. Both mornings there came to him a picture of Gertie, wanting to slip out and play like Ruth, but having no chance. He felt guilty because he had never bidden Gertie come tramping, and guiltily he recalled that it was with her that the boy Carl had gone to seek-our-fortunes. He told himself that he had been depending upon Gertie for the bread-and-b.u.t.ter of friendship, and begging for the opportunity to give the stranger, Ruth Winslow, dainties of which she already had too much.

When he called, Sunday evening, he found Gertie alone, reading a love-story in a woman's magazine.

"I'm so glad you came," she said. "I was getting quite lonely." She was as gratefully casual as ever.

"Say, Gertie, I've got a plan. Wouldn't you like to go for some good long hikes in the country?"

"Oh yes; that would be fine when spring comes."

"No; I mean now, in the winter."

She looked at him heavily. "Why, isn't it pretty cold, don't you think?"

He prepared to argue, but he did not think of her as looking heavily.

He did not draw swift comparisons between Gertie's immobility and Ruth's lightness. He was used to Gertie; was in her presence comfortably understanding and understood; could find whatever he expected in her as easily as one finds the editorial page--or the sporting page--in a familiar newspaper. He merely became mildly contentious and made questioning noises in his throat as she went on: