FullReads

And he did read them later, after he had carefully folded the gray shawl and placed it out of his range of vision–half a score of closely written pages filled with gentle girlish analysis of the writer’s love and its unique manifestations, and ending with a tepid interest in the “queer people” among whom her lover’s lot was cast. “It is very hard, my dear,” she wrote, “to think of you in that lonely place, cut off from everybody and everything interesting; but we must bear it bravely, since it is to make you strong and well.”

Palmerston held the letter in his hand, and looked steadily through the tent window across the sea of fog that had settled over the valley.

“After all, she is not selfish,” he reflected; “she has nothing to gain by saving Dysart, except”–he smiled grimly–“her rascally father’s good name.”

* * * * *

The rains were late, but they came at last, blowing in soft and warm from the southeast, washing the dust from the patient orange-trees and the draggled bananas, and luring countless green things out of the brown mould of the mesa into the winter sun. Birds fledged in the golden drought of summer went mad over the miracles of rain and grass, and riotously announced their discovery of a new heaven and a new earth to their elders. The leafless poinsettia flaunted its scarlet diadem at Palmerston’s tent door, a monarch robbed of all but his crown, and the acacias west of the Dysart dooryard burst into sunlit yellow in a night.

The rains had not been sufficient to stop work on the tunnel, and John watched its progress with the feverish eagerness of an inexperienced gambler. Now that it was fairly under way, Brownell seemed to lose interest in the result, and wandered, satchel in hand, over the mountain-side, leaving fragments of his linen duster on the thorny chaparral, and devising new schemes for the enrichment of the valley, to which his daughter listened at night in skeptical silence. Now and then his voice fell from some overhanging crag in a torrent of religious rapture, penetrating the cabin walls and trying Mrs. Dysart’s pious soul beyond endurance.

“Now listen to that, Emeline!” said John, exultantly, during one of these vocal inundations. “He’s a-singin’ the doxology. Now I believe he’s a Christian.”

Mrs. Dysart averted her face with a sigh of long-suffering patience.

“Singin’ is the easiest part of the Christian religion, Jawn. As for that,”–she jerked her head toward the source of vocal supply,–“it’s soundin’ brass; that’s what I’d say if I was settin’ in judgment, which I thank our heavenly Fawther I’m not.”

“Well, there goes Mr. Palmerston and the girl, anyway,” said John, with eager irrelevance; “they seem to be gettin’ pretty thick.”

Mrs. Dysart moved toward the open window with piously restrained curiosity.

“I’m sorry for that girl,” she said; “she’s got one man more’n she can manage now, without tacklin’ another.”

“Oh, well, now, Emeline, young folks, will be young folks, you know.” There was in John’s voice something dangerously near satisfaction with this well-known peculiarity of youth.

“Yes; and they’ll be old folks, too, which most of ’em seems to forget,” returned Mrs. Dysart, sending a pessimistic glance after the retreating couple.

Mrs. Dysart was right. Sidney Palmerston and his companion were not thinking of old age that winter day. The mesa stretched a mass of purple lupine at their feet. There was the odor of spring, the warmth of summer, the languor of autumn, in the air. As they neared the canyon the path grew narrow, and the girl walked ahead, turning now and then, and blocking the way, in the earnestness of her speech. They had long since ceased to talk of the tunnel; Sidney had ceased even to think of it. For weeks he had hardly dared to think at all. There had been at first the keen sense of disappointment in himself which comes to every confident soul as it learns the limitations of its own will; then the determination, so easy to youth’s foreshortening view, to keep the letter of his promise and bury the spirit out of his own sight and the sight of the world forever; then the self-pity and the pleading with fate for a little happiness as an advance deposit on the promise of lifelong self-sacrifice; then the perfumed days when thought was lulled and duty became a memory and a hope. Strangely enough, it was always duty, this unholy thing which he meant to do–this payment of a debt in base metal, when the pure gold of love had been promised. But ethics counted for little to-day as he followed a figure clad in blue serge down the path that led from the edge of the canyon to the bed of the stream. Budding willows made a green mist in the depths below them, and the sweet, tarry odors of the upland blew across the tops of the sycamores in the canyon and mingled with the smell of damp leaf-mould and the freshness of growing things.