Читать книгу Blue Ruin (Musaicum Romance Classics) - Grace Livingston Hill - Страница 5

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Out on the road, the two who had been the cause of all this disturbance were walking joyously along. The first day home, the first day together after long separation, all their childhood waiting to greet them out of doors, and a summer day that was perfect. One of those “what-is-so-rare” days described by the poet.

The sky was that warm, clear blue that makes you wonder if you have ever really noticed a sky before. The sunlight fairly seemed a part of the sky, blue all through with the fine lacings of gold. One or two lazy fluffs of cloud were drifting almost imperceptibly across the highest blue like tufts of down urged by an unseen draft.

The road they took skirted a hill and wound gently up with pleasant homes on the right at intervals growing fewer and farther between as they went on.

Off to the left the mountains were clear and sharp with touches of gold shimmering over the new green of the young trees that mingled with the darker pines. And one spot they knew, where the blue grew deeper with a purple depth, marked the beginning of the Mohawk trail. They could pick out the landmarks without any trouble in the clear, bright atmosphere.

And now they came to fields on the left drifting down to a valley where, like a thread of hurrying silver strung with jewels all aquiver, a river went. And all the fields were embroidered with flowers, copper and silver and gold like a princess’s garment spread to dry, heavy with gorgeous needlework of buttercups, daisies, and devil’s paintbrush. Amazing sight to come upon! Embroidery of heaven loaned for display.

Beyond the river, a dull hill rose, rocky and barren, almost a mountain, dreary except for a drift of blue flowers that rose in waves and seemed to spread and quiver like blue flame, or lovely, curling, smoke-like incense rising against the gray mass of the barren rock behind.

“Oh look!” cried Lynette, her eyes sparkling, her cheeks aglow. “I never remember it to have been so beautiful! How large the daisies are this year! How yellow the buttercups! And see how deep a red the tassels of the devil’s paintbrush are! This must be a wonderful year for flowers!”

Dana lifted indifferent eyes.

“Oh, you’ve just forgotten, Lynn. I don’t see but it looks about as usual.”

“No, Dana! It’s bigger, brighter, much more wonderful. I never got that effect of copper and silver threads before, with the gold of the buttercups making a background. It’s perfectly gorgeous needlework, Dana, woven with pearls.”

“Oh, you’re fanciful as usual, Lynn!”

“And look at that blue ruin off on the mountain! Why you can fairly see the smoke rise and the flames pulsate.”

“It’s not half as good to look at as you are, Lynn,” said the young man turning his glance upon her glowing cheeks, the light in her lovely eyes, and the tendrils of hair blowing around her face. “I say, where are we going today? Have you thought of a plan? It’s a shame that car had to go to the garage. You’ll be tired before the day is half over.”

“No indeed; I’ll not be tired,” said Lynette. “I haven’t been cooped up in the house all these four years, laddie. I’ve played hockey and skated and hiked over the hills, and worked in the gym. I’m fit as ever I was, and I can walk as far as ever I did and farther.”

“Well, I can’t,” said Dana lazily, stifling a yawn. “Theological seminaries are no places for physical training. Oh, of course they had some athletics, but I couldn’t see going out for anything with all I had to do. Besides, it was time to stop that child’s play if I ever meant to amount to anything. One can’t play football all one’s life.”

“Still one must have health,” said Lynette. “I hope you haven’t allowed yourself to get inactive. It’s awfully hard on you to study hard if you don’t keep up some sort of exercise. They made us do it out at college.”

“Oh, girls, yes, I suppose it’s a good thing for them. But a man has got to begin to think of more serious things. Besides, it’s an awful chore to get cleaned up and get to work again when you’re all messed up after sports. I’ve really done awfully well, Lynn. Even better than I told you in my last letter. Let’s see, when did I write? I got so busy in those last weeks. But you got the papers I sent, and the commencement stuff? You really ought to have been there Lynn to hear me preach my first sermon. I can’t see why it mattered whether you stayed for your own commencement exercises or not, that little stuffy college! It’s ridiculous to dignify it by the name of college! But there, don’t get excited!” he laughed indulgently. “It’s all right of course, and you were a star student naturally. I only wish it had been Vassar or Wellesley or some big college. You could have made your mark there, and it would have been worthwhile”

A shade came over the girl’s face and a flash into her eyes.

“Dana! Stop!” she cried. “You shan’t say such things about my college! It isn’t like you, and you don’t know, and I won’t have my beautiful day spoiled! Tell me about your commencement. Someday I’ll tell you all about my college, and you will see that it was great! Someday I’ll take you there and introduce you to my wonderful professors, every one of them masters and scholars, and every one of them men who are putting their whole soul into their work. But nevermind now. You just don’t know! You will understand when you know, and you will be glad there is such a place. But now forget it and go on. I want to hear everything you have done from the time you left here last year. No little thing is too small to be told. Don’t leave anything out. Did they tell you they thought it would be hard to get a church? Or have you decided to go as a missionary? You used to talk that way, you know.”

“Oh, I gave up that idea long ago,” he laughed. “I think this country needs preachers more than the foreign field. Times are changed, you know. A lot has been done for heathen lands in the last ten years. The world isn’t nearly as large as it used to be. Travel has become so easy, and civilization has made great strides. Culture and education are everywhere. Why, look what a difference movies and radios have made! The natives in the jungles of the forest can get the latest Paris fashion overnight now. There really isn’t the need of missionaries there used to be when I began to study for the ministry.”

Lynette giggled appreciatively.

“You talk as if the main object of missionaries was to dress up the natives in fashionable garments.”

“Well, that had a great deal to do with civilizing them, didn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” said Lynette with serious eyes far off on the mountain where the blue incense seemed to rise and fall with the light breeze. “Did it? I don’t know. What’s that verse about ‘where no law is, there is no transgression’?”

“Oh, now, Lynn, don’t, I pray you, get preachy. I’m sick to death of arguments and criticisms and obscure passages. Besides, my dear, you are not fitted to cope with a subject like that. The standpoint from which we used to take our conclusions when we were children is very different when you come to get the student’s point of view. Let’s drop discussions from now on. We’ve got a long way to go to catch up in our knowledge of each other. Let’s talk about each other. Lynn, are you glad to be at home, or does the old town look dull to you?”

“Look dull? Well, I should rather guess not. Why, Dana, I turned down a whole perfectly good, free trip to Europe with side trips and a possible winter stay over there with a trip to the Holy Land and a return by way of the Mediterranean thrown in. Now, will you believe that I’m glad to be here?”

“Lynn Brooke! D’ you mean it? Turn down a trip like that? What for?”

“Just because there was no place in the whole world that looked so good to me as my hometown and you in it all summer long!” Lynette added the last words half shyly, half jocosely, and glanced up through her lashes at her companion with a heightened color in her lovely cheeks. But Dana frowned.

“Lynn, I can’t believe you were quite so foolish as that. Tell me about it. Who invited you?”

“Uncle Roth Reamer. He and Aunt Hilda and my three cousins are going, and they wanted me.”

“Expenses paid?”

“Every cent. And spending money thrown in! Uncle Roth is always generous and treats me just like the rest of his children when I’m visiting there.”

“Well, you certainly are one little fool!” said Dana almost roughly. “Why, Lynn, think of the advantages of culture and study abroad! Think of the prestige of having traveled like that! Why, it would do a whole lot toward making up for having been graduated at a little insignificant college if it were known that you had traveled widely. You need sophistication, Lynn. You haven’t grown up! You’re just as innocent as when you were a child! You really need to grow up. You don’t realize that you will have a very prominent position to occupy and need to get ready for it.”

Lynette looked up at him startled, a cloud coming over the brightness of her face, her lips compressed with a sudden indrawing of her breath, the color on her face springing up brighter.

She was silent for a moment, still keeping that wondering, searching gaze on his face, and when she spoke her voice was very quiet and almost cool.

“Do you mean, Dana, that you are ashamed of me as I am?”

“Nonsense!” said Dana impatiently. “There you go, off the handle at once, jumping to conclusions. That’s just what I mean. Like an everlasting thermometer, out to check the temperature and be sure it’s just at seventy. You need poise, Lynn! And travel will give it to you. If your school had been any good you wouldn’t be so utterly childish. If I’m to be called to a big-city church, you will need to get poise. There’s nothing like that to help you up in the world and make you able to hold your own.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, Dana,” said Lynette in a small, distant voice, almost like a stranger. “I supposed you were looking forward to preaching the gospel. What has that got to do with social prestige?”

“A very great deal!” said Dana with the air of a teacher who was condescending to explain to the humblest of pupils. “In the first place, a preacher’s wife can do a lot toward helping or hindering her husband’s progress in his work. She is either an asset or a liability. I have always figured that you, Lynette, with your beauty and your goodness your most obvious goodness and your charm of manner would be the greatest kind of an asset. But there is something else. It is something that women of the world have, and that is why they succeed so well.” He floundered a little here, for her eyes were upon him, wondering eyes, as if she had never quite known this Dana before.

“There is a verse in the Bible,” he suddenly said with irritation, “which you should remember. We are bidden to be wise as serpents! That’s what it means, use worldly wisdom. Acquire the poise that the world has and then we shall be better able to cope with”

He paused, searching for a word.

“Sin?” supplied Lynette questioningly. “I hadn’t really ever thought of it in that way.”

There was something in her voice that irritated him still further, for he felt that somehow, while he was attempting to show her how she was wrong, she had instead revealed a weakness in himself. Or could she possibly be laughing at him? He had not made his case as strong as it seemed to him to be. He must try again. You never could force Lynette into a situation, you must always lead her. He ought to have remembered that. She would do anything in the world for him, but of course she did not like his criticism of that little superficial college of hers. That was what was the matter.

“Lynn,” he said, softening his voice to its old lover-like strain, “I see I haven’t made my meaning plain. It’s all because I don’t like to blow my own trumpet and tell you all the great prospects that have come to me. You see, they’ve been saying a lot of fine things about my work, and my ability, up there at the seminary, and I’ve the same as got the choice of two or three prominent pulpits if I just say the word. Let’s quit this foolish quarreling and let me tell the whole thing. Don’t you want to hear what my senior professor said to me the last day, the man who has the reputation of forecasting the future of his students and never making a mistake?”

“Why, surely,” said Lynn graciously, her eyes misty with pride in him, despite her disturbed spirit. “You know I enjoy hearing everything about your seminary life. But it never surprises me, Dana. I knew you would excel. Now, tell me every word.”

There was just the least bit of hurt tone in her voice that he had not felt the same about her, but he did not notice it in his eagerness to tell her, and she was too humble in spirit to assert it again.

So Dana told.

Long incidents of class lore. Struggles for scholarly supremacy, days and nights of grinding. Self-denial of a kind, Dana’s kind, the kind that really got what he wanted. Grudging recognition at first on the part of his friends, instant recognition on the part of the professors. Brilliant accounts of arguments and discussions in class in which he came forward with some original thought, was challenged, and was able to bring notable critics as testimony to substantiate his theory. In short, as she listened, Lynette perceived that this was no longer her mate and equal, her boy companion of the years, to whom she was giving audience, but a distinguished scholar who had already made his mark before his career had fairly opened.

Lynette’s heart was full of joy.

She forgot for the time-being his criticism of herself.

They had passed by the embroidered pastures and valleys, leaving the blue-flowered smoke behind on the mountain, and as they went up higher into a thick grove of trees bordered by fringes of maidenhair fern unbelievably luxuriant, fragilely lovely, Lynette was conscious of a tightening of the muscles round her heart. To think that he was hers, and they were here in sanctuary as it were, alone with the great out of doors to talk together again and get to know the things about one another that had been withheld through the months of separation!

Her eyes rested pridefully upon him as he tossed off his hat and threw himself down upon the moss at her side, and she was conscious again of the quickening heartbeats, the sudden shyness that made her fight for timejust a little space to get used to his nearness again, to the thought that they were really grown up.

“Tell me something, Dana, I’ve often wondered,” she said, suddenly feeling the necessity to cover her shyness with words.

“Yes, dearest!” He smiled down upon her and reached out to take possession of her hand which lay beside him on the moss. It was his first open acknowledgment of the relation between them, which had been tacitly set aside for years of their education, the first time he had ventured on that “dearest” since his very young boy affection which she had gravely restrained with wiser foresight than his own. “We are not old enough for such things yet, Dana, please don’t spoil the beautiful time we are having now,” she had told him. How well she remembered saying it to him, and having to argue it out for days when he would not be convinced. Yet in the end she had conquered, and their friendship had gone on, with only the tacit understanding that there was to be no more sentimentality until they were done with schooldays. Nevertheless they had both looked forward to living their lives side by side to the end and had often referred to the time when that would be as if it were a foregone conclusion.

Dana had wanted to give her a ring two years before, the day he was going back to seminary and she to her college. But she had said no, he must not spend the money now, and it would be time enough to settle those things when they both got home for good.

Lynette had known when she came home this time that she was coming home to face what she had put behind a lovely veil out of sight for a long time, but had always deep in her heart known was waiting there for her when the right time came. Today, she had started out with the knowledge that the time had come. The lessons were learned for both of them, and they had a right to let their hearts speak out to one another and to take their right relations before the world. Yet now that it had come she felt a sudden strange shyness, as if Dana were not the same, as if he had changed into a new man, one that she admired greatly and respected and loved beyond all the world; yet somehow she stood in a strange new awe before him. And so she spoke breathlessly, marking time for her heart to get steady and used to the thrill of his touch in this new way.

“I’ve always wanted to know just why you decided to study for the ministry, why you were so sure even when you were a little boy and I first knew you that there was nothing else in life for you. Was it that your grandfather had been such a great preacher and that you had his name and felt you must keep a sort of tryst with the work he had commenced, or was it something else?” She finished shyly with her eyes gravely down, her face almost quivering in her eagerness. “I think I know the answer, Dana”she lifted her eyes for a single fleeting look“but I want to hear you say it, if you don’t mind.”

It was very still there in the edge of the pine forest, with the fringe of maidenhair below them and the shimmer of the embroidery of copper and silver and gold out in the June Valleys far away. Almost for an instant it seemed to Lynette that it was sanctuary indeed, with the whispering winds above in the pines, a bird note dropping slowly down now and then from the throat of a thrush, and Dana’s eyes upon her in that grave, sweet, utterly loving look. Then he spoke.

“Lovely, of course I’ll tell you, though there’s not so much to tell. As you say, you know it already, you’ve known it all along. Why of course it was Grandfather. I felt the obligation, sort of. I was named for him; he left me his property, or at least he left it with Grandmother in trust for me, you know. That’s the same thing. It was Grandfather’s dearest wish. And the family all expect it. A man would be a cad not to carry on after that. I thought about it a good deal when I was in college. There were several other lines I might have taken up where I would have been able to make more money and fame right at the start than seemed likely at that time I could ever make in the ministry. But nowhere would I have had more prestige of course. Really Grandfather was quite a great man. I never really understood how great until I entered the seminary. There were men there who remembered him, enthused over his preaching and all that. More than once he was held up in class as an example of a man who had reached the top of his profession. His sermons, too, were cited as illustrations of a pure, direct style that was recommended for imitation. You would have been surprised how reverently even some of the more eminent scholars among the faculty spoke of his strange, old-fashioned books of sermons. I read them long ago, of course, when I was a mere boy. They filled me with awe then with their tremendous earnestness. Of course they are quite out of date now, but classics in their way. I almost got my head turned, Lynn, they made so much of it in seminary, I having the same name and all and following in his footsteps. It did a lot for me in the way of prestige. Lynn, the light on your hair just there where you’re sitting is lovely. I don’t know but I’m glad you never bobbed your hair, though I confess I’m surprised that you’ve lived through the fashion so long without doing it. You will have to come to it of course if the fashion doesn’t change soon, though, for if I get a city church you’ll have to be quite up to date, you know.”

She looked at him startled then smiled. He was joking of course. She laughed. “A city church!” she echoed. “You couldn’t begin on a city church, of course!”

“Brownleigh thinks I can,” he said gravely, with conviction. “He says my talents would be wasted anywhere else. So you better be thinking about cutting your hair. You don’t want to look like a country parson’s wife.”

Lynette did not smile. Her eyes were puzzled as she studied his face.

“You speak almost as if you meant that,” she said lightly.

“I do,” he said brightly. “I think you would be charming with it cut. Haven’t you often longed to get it off and be like the other girls?”

“But you used to say you liked my hair,” said Lynette.

“Well, I do, but one must be reasonable. You can’t go against the whole world of course, and one gets used to those things. But Lynn, I’m hungry as a bear. Why don’t we eat? I haven’t told you yet, but I’ve got to go back pretty soon.”

“Got to go back!” said Lynette in dismay. “Why, you said we were to stay till sunset! It’s our day. It’s been four years since we sat up here till sunset and talked so long, you know. It’s”

She had almost said, “It’s my birthday, you know,” but he saved her further words.

“You don’t say! It was about this time, wasn’t it? Well, it’s too bad. But we’ll come another time, tomorrow if I can manage it. You see we’re going to have company at our house for several weeks I’m afraid, but it won’t affect me after today. I gave Aunt Justine warning I wouldn’t have anybody wished on me this summer. But I have to go down to meet them on the four-thirty train; the woman is sick and she has her child with her, and they can’t walk to the bus line. I offered to pay for a taxi but Aunt Justine seemed to think that was ungracious when they are first arriving, and she carried on so that I had to give in and say I’d come home in time to cart them up from the train. Aunt Justine is a great nuisance. She knows how to put the whole household in an uproar with just a few words. If I had my way she would be sent away. But Grandmother seems to think she has an obligation so there’s no way. Now, let’s see what’s in that basket. I declare I’ve been starving all the way up. I’m sure I smell chocolate cake and tarts. Are there tarts? I knew it! Open it quick, Lynn. We mustn’t waste anymore time!”

Lynette gravely lifted the white cloth and spread it on the moss. There lay the neat little waxed-paper packages as she had placed them, but the glory had gone out of them somehow. She heard Dana saying funny things and praising and exclaiming, but it did not seem to mean anything to her. She couldn’t quite understand why. Was she such a silly, selfish girl that she had to hang on to a piece of a day when somebody else needed it? Of course Dana must go after his aunt’s company, and of course she must not let him see that she was disappointed. What was an hour to two more or less out of a day when it was all to be theirs by and by? What would it matter if they did go down a little earlier than they had planned? Dana hated it, of course, as much as she did. And he was coming to dinner. It wouldn’t be but a few minutes they would be separated.

She looked up with a smile.

“Well, never mind,” she said with a sigh that she tried to turn into cheerfulness. “It won’t take you but a few minutes, and you’ll come right back to the house after you have got them, won’t you? You know you are to take dinner at our house tonight. You remember I invited you four years ago, don’t you?”

“Am I? Why, sure, you did, didn’t you, Lynn? How you keep little details in your mind, don’t you? That’s going to be a great asset in a minister’s wife. Lynn, I can see you’re going to be a great help to me.”

“It’s what I want to be,” she breathed almost inaudibly, as if she were registering a long-contemplated vow. “I haven’t forgotten that my own father was a minister, you know, too.”

“Why, so he was!” said Dana taking a great bite out of his chicken sandwich. “We’ll be quite following in the way of tradition, won’t we? Only I don’t intend that you shall be ridden to death by any congregation. It isn’t the fashion now for the minister’s wife to have to be the slave to the church. They don’t even make calls on anybody except the ones they want for close friends. We’ll see something of society, sweetheart, and go to some good concerts and maybe get a trip abroad now and then. You don’t realize what great things we’re coming into. You won’t know yourself five years from now. I’m not going to have you all worn out carrying soup to the sick and comforting the brokenhearted and running mite societies. You’re mine, you know. I shall need all the comforting you’ll have time to give, and we’ll have a maid to make the soup and a deaconess to visit the parishioners.”

“But I should love to do that work, Dana. Don’t talk that way. I’ve always said if I had been a man I would have been a minister.”

“Well, you’re not a man, thank fortune, Lynn, and I don’t approve of women ministers, so you’ll have to be content to minister to my wants. Come, don’t let’s quarrel. Is that a cup custard that I see? Mother Brooke’s cup custard as I live! What a feast! Lynn, was there ever a day so good as this one?”

Lynette tried to smile, handed out the wonders of the lunch basket bit by bit, ate scarcely anything herself, and wondered what had gone wrong with her day. What did this vague uneasiness in her heart mean? Of course Dana was more or less joking, as he always did, and all this talk meant nothing at all. Didn’t she know him of old? He was earnestness itself, and this was only a glorified way of trying to show her he was going to take special care of her.

Yet after all when they had packed up the basket and picked up the bits of waxed paper to leave the woods tidy as they had found it, she had a vague feeling of hurry, as if Dana’s mind was not on the day. He had said nothing about the ring either. How often she had pictured the time to herself when he would bring it out of his pocket in its little velvet case and place it upon her finger! He had told her it was to be the best diamond he could find, and though she had hushed his talk about it then, she had pondered much in her heart all that he had spoken.

Yet the day was bright, and it was to be longer. Doubtless he would wait till evening. There would be a moon. Perhaps he would wait till the shadows hid them out in the garden somewhere, although she had always thought of the ring in connection with this spot, their trysting place, where he as a boy of nineteen had spoken his first eager tempestuous words of love. How they had grown in her heart with her life through the years, till now she was waiting for their confirmation with a heart so full of answering love and exultation that it almost choked her to think about it as he talked on.

She was very quiet during the rest of the time that they stayed on the mountain, but he was so full of eager speech himself that he did not notice it. And when he looked at his watch and said impatiently that it was time to go, she got up with a smile, in a kind of daze of joy, for somehow the trouble had gone from her heart and she had got to the place where she could look up and wait and smile for the joy that was coming to her. Oh, he was wonderful! She looked at him with all her soul in her eyes as they stood up ready to go and the late afternoon sun touched the crest of his dark hair and gave his face a statuesque look. What a wonderful minister he was going to make! How stunning he would look in the pulpit! But of course she must not think of that. It was his great spirit that she almost adored, his consecrated young spirit that was joyously giving up all the fine prospects he might have had in the world to devote his life to the ministry.

And then he took her in his arms, almost hungrily, she thought, and then fiercely, as if he could not get enough of her sweetness. He laid his lips on her hair, on her forehead, and she closed her eyes and dropped her face against his breast, feeling it was so good to be there at last in his strong arms. Yes, it was good as all her dreams had been. And at last his lips found hers, and it seemed as if all the promises of all the years of her young life had come to consummation now, in that one strong, tender kiss.

And yet, when he finally freed her and they started down the mountain hand in hand, her cheeks rosy, her eyes downcast, there was something almost frightening in the thought of his embrace; it had been so strong and fierce, as if her whole being were submerged and changed into his. As if she might not be allowed to be her own self anymore. What did it mean? Was it just life? Was life always like that? So startling?

She was pondering these things when they came to Round Hill, a lovely eminence that rose in perfect symmetry between two higher hills and burst upon one unexpectedly at a turn in the road.

Lynette remembered a time in her little girlhood when the hill had been covered with waving grain, green and velvety in spring, or golden like waves rippling in the autumn sunshine. But this day it was radiant with blue and white flowers and fairly took her breath away as it burst upon her sight.

“Oh, look!” she said, interrupting him in one of his seminary tales. “Did you ever see such a sight!”

They passed and stood before the miracle of bloom, half in awe.

The daisies had crept thickly over the lovely roundness of the hill which rose straight up before their vision. They covered it completely as with a fine, white linen cloth, their golden centers making a shimmer like lights falling from above; and all through the daisies, in serried ranks, tall spikes of blue ruin had shot up in luxurious bloom, every little gray-green, rolled-up, leafy spike fluting out in the deep weird blue of its tubular corolla. They seemed like tall candles burning above the white cloth and lifting their blue flame to the blue sky above. It was a sight to take the breath away with beauty.

Dana took off his hat and stood, looking up.

“It is like a sacrament!” he said in the voice he used when he practiced pronouncing the benediction.

“It is like” Lynette’s voice had something hard and terrified in it. “It is like Satan!” she finished.

“What on earth do you mean, Lynette?” said Dana in a voice of reproof. He never called her by her full name unless he was displeased with her.

But she did not notice his displeasure. She was looking at the gorgeous display of beauty with sad eyes.

“Lucifer, son of the morning!” she quoted. “It is terrible in its beauty to me. That blue ruin is a nettle, you know, viper’s weed. It chokes everything else out when it comes in. And daisies have the same nature, too! Come, I can’t bear it. It is too beautiful! It makes me think of sin getting into the world and spoiling all the good things of life! I can remember now how proud Grandfather was of his waving grain on Round Hill. And now blue ruin has spoiled all his work of the years!”

“What nonsense!” said Dana, speaking haughtily, harshly. “What utter bosh! That’s some more of that ignorant little college, teaching you fanciful things like that! I really shall have to take you in hand I see. That belongs to the phraseology of a notorious class of ignorant literalists who think they know it all and are making themselves ridiculous. Really, Lynette, I supposed you had more sense. We’ll take a week off and sit down while I give you a little of the exegesis we had in class. A good dose of notes out of my class notebooks will get that folly out of you. Meantime, oblige me by leaving his majesty the devil out of the conversation.” He finished half lightly, for glancing down he saw that her eyes were full of tears.

“There, Lynn, don’t take things too seriously,” he coaxed, snatching her hand and drawing it within his arm. “You are tired. I let you walk too far. We’ll have the car tomorrow. Come forget it. Everything will come all right and you’ll get adjusted to things. You are not to blame; it’s just the old-fashioned ideas you have been taught, but I’ll change all that. I’ll tell you all the modern ways. You’re an unusually bright woman, Lynn, and must understand before you can follow. Most women don’t bother themselves at all about theology, but you have a mind that is worthy of being taught. It is a great pity that you couldn’t have had a worthwhile college. I’d have liked to have had you study theology with some of my professors in the seminary. You certainly would have enjoyed it. They were keen men, broad-minded, with a vision of the future. They lost no time in sweeping the cobwebs of the ages out of my brain. I declare, I believe you could even have enjoyed Greek and Hebrew! Come, Lynn, be yourself and smile. It isn’t like you to be in the sulks.”

Lynette looked up almost sadly. She wondered what he would think if she were to tell him? But this was no time to disclose a secret she had been keeping for four years to surprise him.

“I’m not sulky,” she said gravely. “I’m just astonished. Startled perhaps. You talk so strangely. You do not seem like yourself. It hurts to have you talk that way.”

“That’s natural,” sympathized Dana somewhat loftily. “Everything changes as we grow older. We can’t be children always, you know. I confess I was somewhat startled myself when I first went to college and found out how many wrong notions I had acquired. But it will all seem perfectly harmonious when you get adjusted to the new order, my dear, and it’s really much more beautiful and free. It gives one a chance for individual thinking along broad lines without being hampered by so many ‘thou-shalt-nots’.”

“I don’t quite think I understand you,” said Lynette in a voice that was cool, almost stern with apprehension.

“Don’t try,” said Dana lightly. “Let’s put it aside for today. We’ve just a few minutes left before we get home. Let’s enjoy every minute of it. Hasn’t this been a perfect day? Look at the valley now with that broad band of low sunlight across it. That brings out your metal embroidery in fine shape, doesn’t it?”

Lynette lifted unseeing eyes to the gorgeous valley, but she was not thinking about the landscape. There were things that Dana had said that did not seem to ring true to his old convictions. Had Dana changed? She was weighing his words carefully to see if she might have misunderstood him.

Dana talked on volubly, but Lynette walked the rest of the way home almost in silence with downcast, troubled eyes. There seemed somehow to have been a great many things said that day that were disturbing. Or was it purely her imagination? Yet he had been critical, of her college, herself, and her way of thinking. Was she perhaps growing conceited that it hurt her to be criticized?

The long afternoon shadows were beginning to lay gray fingers over the bright meadows and draw shy veils of mystery across the more distant mountains as they came in sight of town. In the end they had to hurry. Dana left her a block from her home and started on a run, for it was getting near train time and he had to go to the garage for the car before he could go to the station.

Lynette, lingering, walking slowly with troubled demeanor, tried to shake off the feeling of depression that hung upon her like a weight. How foolish of her to let such thoughts take possession of her! It was just because she was so wrought up about getting home and being with Dana again. Tonight they would have a good talk and clear all the trouble up. Dana was all right. Of course he had not changed! Hadn’t she known him for years? Dana couldn’t change!

But her mother was waiting on the porch! She must have seen Dana go by and would be wondering what was the matter and where she was. She hastened her steps and summoned a smile. Her mother must not see that she was upset. Mother was always so keen to read right through her and pick out what was in her heart, sometimes when she didn’t even know it was there herself.

“Dana had to go to the station to meet some tiresome visitors for his Aunt Justine,” she explained as she came up the walk. “Oh, yes, he’s coming back to supper. I’m glad I got home so soon. Now I’ll have time to make the biscuits for you. No, I’m not a bit tired. I’ll love to make them! You lie down in the hammock and rest. I just know you’ve been on your feet all day. You always do on birthdays. Oh, yes, I’ve had a wonderful time, you dear little mother! And where is Grandmother? I haven’t had my birthday kiss from her yet. And Elim! Did he go fishing? I’m afraid he was disappointed. I promised him a long time ago and didn’t realize.”

She passed lightly in at the porch door and her mother looked after her yearningly. Was there a shadow in her girl’s eyes?

Well, but there was no ring on her girl’s finger not yet!