FullReads

But Sharley, at the look, sat up straight. Her heart leaped out into the yellow light. All her dreary winter danced and dwindled away. Through the cracks in the pine boards a long procession of May-days came filing in. The scattering rain-drops flamed before her. “All the world and all the waters blushed and bloomed.” She was so very young!

“I could not speak,” he told her quietly, “when I was at home before. I could never speak till now. Last October I thought”—his voice sinking hoarsely—”I thought, Sharley, it could never be. I could barely eke out my daily bread; I had no right to ask you—to bind you. You were very young; I thought, perhaps, Sharley, you might forget. Somebody else might make you happier. I would not stand in the way of your happiness. I asked God to bless you that morning when I went away in the cars, Sharley. Sharley!”

Something in her face he could not understand. All that was meant by the upturned face perhaps he will never understand. She hid it in her bright, brown hair; put her hand up softly upon his cheek and cried.

“If you would like to hear anything about the business part of it—” suggested the young man, clearing his throat. But Sharley “hated business.” She would not hear.

“Not about the Crumpet Buildings? Well, I carried that affair through,—that’s all.”

They came out under the wide sky, and walked home hand in hand. All the world was hung with crystals. The faint shadow of a rainbow quivered across a silver cloud.

The first thing that Sharley did when she came home was to find Moppet and squeeze him.

“O Moppet, we can be good girls all the same if we are happy, can’t we?”

“No, sir!” said injured Moppet. “You don’t catch me!”

“But O Moppet, see the round drops hanging and burning on the blinds! And how the little mud-puddles shine, Moppet!”

Out of her pain and her patience God had brought her beautiful answer. It was well for Sharley. But if such answer had not come? That also would have been well.