“George Harland—a red-headed boy?” he asked wonderingly.
She nodded.
“We were engaged for years. Sometimes I thought we’d never marry. Twice I postponed it, but it was getting late to just be a girl—I was twenty-five, and so finally we did. After that I was in love with him for over a year.”
When the sunset fell together in a jumbled heap of color in the bottom of the sky, they strolled back along the quiet road, still hand in hand.
“Will you come to dinner? I want you to see the children. My oldest boy is just fifteen.”
She lived in a plain frame house two doors from the garage, where two little girls were playing around a battered and ancient but occupied baby carriage in the yard.
“Mother! Oh Mother!” they cried.
Small brown arms swirled around her neck as she knelt beside them on the walk.
“Sister says Anna didn’t come, so we can’t have any dinner.”
“Mother’ll cook dinner. What’s the matter with Anna?”
“Anna’s father’s sick. She couldn’t come.”
A tall, tired man of fifty, who was reading a paper on the porch, rose and slipped a coat over his suspenders as they mounted the steps.
“Anna didn’t come,” he said in a noncommittal voice.
“I know. I’m going to cook dinner. Who do you suppose this is here?”
The two men shook hands in a friendly way, and with a certain deference to John Jackson’s clothes and his prosperous manner, Harland went inside for another chair.
“We’ve heard about you a great deal, Mr. Jackson,” he said as Alice disappeared into the kitchen. “We heard about a lot of ways you made them sit up and take notice over yonder.”
John nodded politely, but at the mention of the city he had just left a wave of distaste went over him.
“I’m sorry I ever left here,” he answered frankly. “And I’m not just saying that either. Tell me what the years have done for you, Harland. I hear you’ve got a garage.”
“Yeah—down the road a ways. I’m doing right well, matter of fact. Nothing you’d call well in the city,” he added in hasty depreciation.
“You know, Harland,” said John Jackson, after a moment, “I’m very much in love with your wife.”
“Yeah?” Harland laughed. “Well, she’s a pretty nice lady, I find.”
“I think I always have been in love with her, all these years.”
“Yeah?” Harland laughed again. That someone should be in love with his wife seemed the most casual pleasantry. “You better tell her about it. She don’t get so many nice compliments as she used to in her young days.”
Six of them sat down at table, including an awkward boy of fifteen, who looked like his father, and two little girls whose faces shone from a hasty toilet. Many things had happened in the town, John discovered; the factitious prosperity which had promised to descend upon it in the late nineties had vanished when two factories had closed up and moved away, and the population was smaller now by a few hundred than it had been a quarter of a century ago.
After a plentiful plain dinner they all went to the porch, where the children silhouetted themselves in silent balance on the railing and unrecognizable people called greeting as they passed along the dark, dusty street. After awhile the younger children went to bed, and the boy and his father arose and put on their coats.
“I guess I’ll run up to the garage,” said Harland. “I always go up about this time every night. You two just sit here and talk about old times.”
As father and son moved out of sight along the dim street John Jackson turned to Alice and slipped his arm about her shoulder and looked into her eyes.
“I love you, Alice.”
“I love you.”
Never since his marriage had he said that to any woman except his wife. But this was a new world tonight, with spring all about him in the air, and he felt as if he were holding his own lost youth in his arms.
“I’ve always loved you,” she murmured. “Just before I go to sleep every night, I’ve always been able to see your face. Why didn’t you come back?”
Tenderly he smoothed her hair. He had never known such happiness before. He felt that he had established dominance over time itself, so that it rolled away for him, yielding up one vanished springtime after another to the mastery of his overwhelming emotion.
“We’re still young, we two people,” he said exultantly. “We made a silly mistake a long, long time ago, but we found out in time.”
“Tell me about it,” she whispered.
“This morning, in the rain, I heard your voice.”
“What did my voice say?”
“It said, ‘Come home.’”
“And here you are, my dear.”
“Here I am.”
Suddenly he got to his feet.
“You and I are going away,” he said. “Do you understand that?”
“I always knew that when you came for me I’d go.”
Later, when the moon had risen, she walked with him to the gate.
“Tomorrow!” he whispered.
“Tomorrow!”
His heart was going like mad, and he stood carefully away from her to let foot-steps across the way approach, pass and fade out down the dim street. With a sort of wild innocence he kissed her once more and held her close to his heart under the April moon.
IV
When he awoke it was eleven o’clock, and he drew himself a cool bath, splashing around in it with much of the exultation of the night before.
“I have thought too much these twenty years,” he said to himself. “It’s thinking that makes people old.”
It was hotter than it had been the day before, and as he looked out the window the dust in the street seemed more tangible than on the night before. He breakfasted alone downstairs, wondering with the incessant wonder of the city man why fresh cream is almost unobtainable in the country. Word had spread already that he was home, and several men rose to greet him as he came into the lobby. Asked if he had a wife and children, he said no, in a careless way, and after he had said it he had a vague feeling of discomfort.
“I’m all alone,” he went on, with forced jocularity. “I wanted to come back and see the old town again.”
“Stay long?” They looked at him curiously.
“Just a day or so.”
He wondered what they would think tomorrow. There would be excited little groups of them here and there along the street with the startling and audacious news.
“See here,” he wanted to say, “you think I’ve had a wonderful life over there in the city, but I haven’t. I came down here because life had beaten me, and if there’s any brightness in my eyes this morning it’s because last night I found a part of my lost youth tucked away in this little town.”
At noon, as he walked toward Alice’s house, the heat increased and several times he stopped to wipe the sweat from his forehead. When he turned in at the gate he saw her waiting on the porch, wearing what was apparently a Sunday dress and moving herself gently back and forth in a rocking-chair