Here was a predicament! But before Lucinda could do more than despairingly ask herself what was to be done now, Romney answered — not in words, but in deeds. He coolly picked Lucinda up in his arms, as if she had been a child instead of a full grown woman of no mean avoirdupois, and began to wade with her through the water.
Lucinda gasped helplessly. She could not forbid him and she was so choked with rage over his presumption that she could not have spoken in any case. Then came the catastrophe. Romney’s foot slipped on a treacherous round stone — there was a tremendous splash — and Romney and Lucinda Penhallow were sitting down in the middle of Peter Penhallow’s brook.
Lucinda was the first to regain her feet. About her clung in heartbreaking limpness the ruined voile. The remembrance of all her wrongs that night rushed over her soul, and her eyes blazed in the moonlight. Lucinda Penhallow had never been so angry in her life.
“YOU D — D IDIOT!” she said, in a voice that literally shook with rage.
Romney meekly scrambled up the bank after her.
“I’m awfully sorry, Lucinda,” he said, striving with uncertain success to keep a suspicious quiver of laughter out of his tone. “It was wretchedly clumsy of me, but that pebble turned right under my foot. Please forgive me — for that — and for other things.”
Lucinda deigned no answer. She stood on a flat stone and wrung the water from the poor green voile. Romney surveyed her apprehensively.
“Hurry, Lucinda,” he entreated. “You will catch your death of cold.”
“I never take cold,” answered Lucinda, with chattering teeth. “And it is my dress I am thinking of — was thinking of. You have more need to hurry. You are sopping wet yourself and you know you are subject to colds. There — come.”
Lucinda picked up the stringy train, which had been so brave and buoyant five minutes before, and started up the field at a brisk rate. Romney came up to her and slipped his arm through hers in the old way. For a time they walked along in silence. Then Lucinda began to shake with inward laughter. She laughed silently for the whole length of the field; and at the line fence between Peter Penhallow’s land and the Grange acres she paused, threw back the fascinator from her face, and looked at Romney defiantly.
“You are thinking of — THAT,” she cried, “and I am thinking of it. And we will go on, thinking of it at intervals for the rest of our lives. But if you ever mention it to me I’ll never forgive you, Romney Penhallow!”
“I never will,” Romney promised. There was more than a suspicion of laughter in his voice this time, but Lucinda did not choose to resent it. She did not speak again until they reached the Grange gate. Then she faced him solemnly.
“It was a case of atavism,” she said. “Old Grandfather Gordon was to blame for it.”
At the Grange almost everybody was in bed. What with the guests straggling home at intervals and hurrying sleepily off to their rooms, nobody had missed Lucinda, each set supposing she was with some other set. Mrs. Frederick, Mrs. Nathaniel and Mrs. George alone were up. The perennially chilly Mrs. Nathaniel had kindled a fire of chips in the blue room grate to warm her feet before retiring, and the three women were discussing the wedding in subdued tones when the door opened and the stately form of Lucinda, stately even in the dragged voile, appeared, with the damp Romney behind her.
“Lucinda Penhallow!” gasped they, one and all.
“I was left to walk home,” said Lucinda coolly. “So Romney and I came across the fields. There was no bridge over the brook, and when he was carrying me over he slipped and we fell in. That is all. No, Cecilia, I never take cold, so don’t worry. Yes, my dress is ruined, but that is of no consequence. No, thank you, Cecilia, I do not care for a hot drink. Romney, do go and take off those wet clothes of yours immediately. No, Cecilia, I will NOT take a hot footbath. I am going straight to bed. Good night.”
When the door closed on the pair the three sisters-in-law stared at each other. Mrs. Frederick, feeling herself incapable of expressing her sensations originally, took refuge in a quotation:
“‘Do I sleep, do I dream, do I wonder and doubt? Is things what they seem, or is visions about?’”
“There will be another Penhallow wedding soon,” said Mrs. Nathaniel, with a long breath. “Lucinda has spoken to Romney AT LAST.”
“Oh, WHAT do you suppose she said to him?” cried Mrs. George.
“My dear Cecilia,” said Mrs. Frederick, “we shall never know.”
They never did know.
Old Man Shaw’s Girl
“Day after tomorrow — day after tomorrow,” said Old Man Shaw, rubbing his long slender hands together gleefully. “I have to keep saying it over and over, so as to really believe it. It seems far too good to be true that I’m to have Blossom again. And everything is ready. Yes, I think everything is ready, except a bit of cooking. And won’t this orchard be a surprise to her! I’m just going to bring her out here as soon as I can, never saying a word. I’ll fetch her through the spruce lane, and when we come to the end of the path I’ll step back casual-like, and let her go out from under the trees alone, never suspecting. It’ll be worth ten times the trouble to see her big, brown eyes open wide and hear her say, ‘Oh, daddy! Why, daddy!’”
He rubbed his hands again and laughed softly to himself. He was a tall, bent old man, whose hair was snow white, but whose face was fresh and rosy. His eyes were a boy’s eyes, large, blue and merry, and his mouth had never got over a youthful trick of smiling at any provocation — and, oft-times, at no provocation at all.
To be sure, White Sands people would not have given you the most favourable opinion in the world of Old Man Shaw. First and foremost, they would have told you that he was “shiftless,” and had let his bit of a farm run out while he pottered with flowers and bugs, or rambled aimlessly about in the woods, or read books along the shore. Perhaps it was true; but the old farm yielded him a living, and further than that Old Man Shaw had no ambition. He was as blithe as a pilgrim on a pathway climbing to the west. He had learned the rare secret that you must take happiness when you find it — that there is no use in marking the place and coming back to it at a more convenient season, because it will not be there then. And it is very easy to be happy if you know, as Old Man Shaw most thoroughly knew, how to find pleasure in little things. He enjoyed life, he had always enjoyed life and helped others to enjoy it; consequently his life was a success, whatever White Sands people might think of it. What if he had not “improved” his farm? There are some people to whom life will never be anything more than a kitchen garden; and there are others to whom it will always be a royal palace with domes and minarets of rainbow fancy.
The orchard of which he was so proud was as yet little more than the substance of things hoped for — a flourishing plantation of young trees which would amount to something later on. Old Man Shaw’s house was on the crest of a bare, sunny hill, with a few staunch old firs and spruces behind it — the only trees that could resist the full sweep of the winds that blew bitterly up from the sea at times. Fruit trees would never grow near it, and this had been a great grief to Sara.
“Oh, daddy, if we could just have an orchard!” she had been wont to say wistfully, when other farmhouses in White Sands were smothered whitely in apple bloom. And when she had gone away, and her father had nothing to look forward to save her return, he was determined she should find an orchard when she came back.
Over the southward hill, warmly sheltered by spruce woods and sloping to the sunshine, was a little field, so fertile that all the slack management of a lifetime had not availed to exhaust it. Here Old Man Shaw set out his orchard and saw it flourish, watching