PAGE 3
A Last Assembling
by
“Come in!” she called; and a light step sounded in the kitchen and crossed the sill. It was a man, dark-eyed and very handsome. “Oh!” murmured Dilly, catching her breath and holding both hands clasped upon the papers in her lap. “Jethro!”
The stranger was much moved, and his black eyes deepened. He looked at her kindly, perhaps lovingly, too. “Yes,” he said, at last. “So you’d know me?”
Dilly got lightly up, and the papers fell about her in a shower; yet she made no motion toward him. “Oh, yes,” she said softly, “I should know you. You ain’t changed at all.”
That was not true. He looked ten years older than his real age; yet time had only dowered him with a finer grace and charm. All the lines in his face were those of gentleness and truth. His mouth had the old delicate curves. One meeting him that day might have said, with a throb of involuntary homage, “How beautiful he must have been when he was young!” But to Dilly he bore even a more subtile distinction than in that far-away time; he had ripened into something harmonizing with her own years. He came forward a little, and held out both hands; but Dilly did not take them, and he dropped the left one. Then she laid her fingers lightly in his, and they greeted each other like old acquaintances. A flush rose in her smooth brown cheek. Her eyes grew bright with that startled questioning which is of the woods. He looked at her the more intently, and his breath quickened. She had none of the blossomy charm of more robust womanhood; but he recognized the old gypsy element which had once bewitched him, and felt he loved her still.
“Well,” he said, and his voice shook a little, “are you glad to see me?”
Dilly moved back, and sat down in her mother’s little sewing-chair by the desk. “I don’t know as I can tell,” she answered. “This is a strange day.”
Jethro nodded. “I meant to surprise you,” he said. “So I never wrote I was coming on so soon. I was real disappointed to find your house shut up; but the neighbors told me where you’d gone, and what you’d gone for. Then I walked over here.”
Dilly’s face brightened all over with a responsive smile. “Did you come through the woods?” she asked. “What made you?”
“Why, I knew you’d go that way,” he answered. “I thought you’d get wool-gathering over some weed or another, and maybe I’d overtake you.”
They both laughed, and the ice was broken. Dilly got briskly up and gathered a drawer-full of papers into her apron.
“I can’t stop workin’,” she said. “I want to fix it so’s not to stay here more ‘n one night. Now you talk! I know what these are. I can run ’em over an’ listen too.”
“I think ‘t was real good of you to turn in the place to Tom’s folks,” said Jethro, also seating himself, and, as Dilly saw with a start, as if it were an omen, in her father’s great chair. “Not that you’ll ever need it, Dilly. You won’t want for a thing. I’ve done real well.”
Dilly’s long fingers assorted papers and laid them at either side, with a neat precision. She looked up at him then, and her eyes had again the quick, inquiring glance of some wild creature in a situation foreign to its habits.
“Well,” she said, “well! I guess I don’t resk anything. An’ if I did–why, I’d resk it!”
Jethro bent forward a little. He was smiling, and Dilly met the glance, half fascinated. She wondered that she could forget his smile; and yet she had forgotten it. Like running water, it was never twice the same.
“Dilly,” said he, much moved, “you’ll have a good time from this out, if ever a woman did. You’ll keep house in a brick block, where the cars run by your door, and you can hire two girls.”