"Why, it is only natural--" the man protested.

"No, no, it is not natural. It may kill all this precious love. You may come to hate me as I hated him, and then, then? No," she continued pa.s.sionately. "Let us not make a ceremony of this. It would be like the other, and I should feel it so always. We will have love, just love, and live so that it makes no difference. You cannot understand!"

Sommers knelt beside her chair.

"Love, love," he repeated. "You shall have it, Alves, as you will--the delirium of love!"

"That is right," she whispered, trembling at his touch. "Talk to me like that. Only more, more. Make my ears ring with it. Your words are so weak!"

"There are no words."

"No, there is not one perfect one in all the thousands!" she uttered, with a low cry. "And they are all alike--all used and common. But this,"--she kissed him, drawing him closer to her beating heart. "This is you and all!"

Thus she taught him the fire of love--so quickly, so surely! From the vague boyish beat.i.tude had sprung this pa.s.sion, like the opulent blossom out of the infolding bosom of the plant. Her kiss had dissipated his horrid suspicions. Her lips were bond and oath and sacrament.

That night they escaped the world with its fierce cross-purposes, its checker-board scheme. The brutality of human success, the anguish of strife,--what is it when man is shut within the chamber of his joy! Outside the peaceful rain fell ceaselessly, quenching the flame and the smoke and the pa.s.sion of the city.

PART II

CHAPTER I

"Next week Monday is the tenth," Alves announced, glancing at the calendar that hung beside the writing-table.

"Well?" Sommers answered. He was preparing to make the daily trip to the post-office on the other side of Perota Lake.

"The Chicago schools open this year on the tenth," Alves continued slowly.

"What difference does that make?"

For reply Alves took from the drawer of the table the old leather purse that was their bank. The mute action made Sommers smile, but he opened the purse and counted the bills. Then he shoved them back into the purse, and replaced it in the drawer.

"I don't know why I haven't heard about my horse," he mused.

"That would only put the day off another month or two," Alves answered. "We have had our day of play--eight long good weeks. The golden-rod has been out for nearly a month, and the geese have started south. We saw a flock yesterday, you remember."

"But you aren't going back to the school!" Sommers protested. "Not to the Everglade School."

"I got the notices last week. They haven't discharged me! Why not?" she added sanely. "You know that it will be hard to build up a practice. And Miss M'Gann wrote me that we could get a good room at the Keystone. That won't be too far from the school."

"I had thought of returning to Marion, where my father practised," Sommers suggested. "If we could only stay _here_, in this shanty three miles from a biscuit!"

Alves smiled, and did not argue the point. They went to the sh.o.r.e where their little flat-bottomed boat was drawn up. Perota Lake, on which the tiny frame cottage stood, was a shallow, reedy pond, connecting by sluggish brooks with a number of other lakes. The sh.o.r.e on this side of the lake was a tangled thicket; the opposite sh.o.r.e rose in a gentle slope to fields of sun-dried grain. The landscape was rich, peaceful, uneventful, with wide s.p.a.ces of sun and cloud and large broad Wisconsin fields. The fierce west wind came cool and damp from the water. Sommers pulled out of the reedy sh.o.r.e and headed for a neighboring lake. After rowing in silence for some time, he rested on his oars.

"Why couldn't we stay here? That is what I want to do--to keep out of the city with its horrible clatter of ambitions, to return to the soil, and live like the primitive peasant without ambition."

The Wisconsin woman smiled sympathetically. She had grown strong and firm-fleshed these summer weeks, sucking vitality from the warm soil.

"The land is all owned around here!" she laughed. "And they use herb doctors or homeopaths. No, we should starve in the midst of harvests. There is only one thing to do, to go back where we can earn a bit of bread."

Sommers started to row, but put down the oars again.

"Do _you_ want to go back?"

"I never think about it. It is so arranged," she answered simply. "Perhaps it will not be always so."

"Which means that we may be more fortunate than our neighbors?"

"I don't know--why think? We have until Monday," and she leaned forward to touch his hand.

Why think! That is what she had taught him. They had sloughed off Chicago at the first, and from the day they arrived at Perota they had sunk into a gentle, solitary routine. Sommers had been content to smoke his pipe, to ruminate on nothings, to be idle with no strenuous summoning of his will.

There had been no perplexity, no revolt, no decision. Even the storm of their love subdued itself to a settled warmth, like that of the insistent summer sun. They had little enough to do with, but they were not aware of their poverty. Alves had had a long training in economy, and with the innate capability of the Wisconsin farmer's daughter, adjusted their little so neatly to their lives that they scarcely thought of unfulfilled wants.

Now why, the man mused, must they break this? Why must they be forced back into a world that they disliked, and that had no place for them? If he were as capable as she, there would be no need. But society has discovered a clever way of binding each man to his bench! While he brooded, Alves watched the gentle hills, straw-colored with grain, and her eyes grew moist at the pleasant sight. She glanced at him and smiled--the comprehending smile of the mothers of men.

"You would not want it always."

They landed at the end of the lake; from there it was a short walk over the dusty country road to the village. The cross-roads hamlet with its saloons and post-office was still sleeping in midday lethargy. Alves pointed to the unpainted, stuffy-looking houses.

"You would not like this."

At the post-office they met a young fellow wearing a ca.s.sock, a strangely incongruous figure in the Wisconsin village. "Are you coming to vespers?"

the young priest asked. His brown, heavy face did not accord with the clerical habit or with the thin clerical voice.

"I think so--for the last time," Alves answered.

"Guy Jones will be there. You remember Guy, Alves? He used to be quite sweet on you in the old days when your brother was at the seminary."

"Yes, I remember Guy," Alves answered hurriedly. She seemed conscious of Sommers's bored gaze. The young priest accompanied them along the dusty road.

"Guy'll be glad to see you again. He's become quite a man out in Painted Post, Nebraska--owns pretty much the whole place--"

"We shall be at vespers," Alves repeated, interrupting the talkative young man.

When his ca.s.sock had disappeared up the dusty road between the fields of corn, she added,

"And that, too, you would not like, nor Guy Jones."

After beaching the boat in front of the cottage they walked to the seminary chapel by a little path through the meadows along the lake, then across a wooded hill where the birds were singing mult.i.tudinously. The buildings of the Perota Episcopal Seminary occupied the level plateau of a hill that lay between two lakes. A broad avenue of elms and maples led to the rude stone cloisters, one end of which was closed by the chapel. To Sommers the cheap factory finish of the chapel and the ostentatious display of ritualism were alike distasteful. The crude fervors of the boy priests were strangely out of harmony with the environment. But Alves, to whom the place was full of a.s.sociations, liked the services. As they entered the cloisters, a tiny bell was jangling, and the students were hurrying into the chapel, their long ca.s.socks lending a foreign air to the Wisconsin fields. Only one other person was seated on the benches beneath the choir, a broad-faced young American, whose keen black eyes rested upon Alves. She was absorbed in the service, which was loudly intoned by the young priest. The candles, the incense, the intoned familiar words, animated her. Sommers had often wondered at the powerful influence this service exerted over her. To the training received here as a child was due, perhaps, that blind wilfulness of self-sacrifice which had first brought her to his notice.

"The remission and absolution of sins--" Alves was breathing heavily, her lips murmuring the mighty words after the priest. Was there a sore hidden in her soul? Did she crave some supernatural pardon for a desperate deed?

The memory of miserable suspicions flashed over him, and gravely, sadly, he watched the quivering face by his side. If she sought relief now in the exercise of her old faith, what would come as the years pa.s.sed and heaped up the burden of remorse!