II
His stiffened limbs ached for action. He begged a cigarette and started northward over the plain.
The air was balmy with a lingering suggestion of Indian Summer. But there was no haze. The flatness of the earth only accentuated the vast arch of the sky. That sky was sharp cobalt. The earth had mellowed to a golden brown, awaiting the snow. And against that combination of cobalt and golden brown, far on ahead, Nathan suddenly saw a furl and flash of deep scarlet, a vivid splash of color as the noon breeze, blowing from the ends of the world, caught the cape of a lone Red Cross nurse and rippled it slightly ahead of her.
She was walking pensively as Nathan came up. She was leaning slightly backward against the breeze. Her loosened hair was blowing about her temples and face. In the crook of her right wrist she carried a book, her forefinger keeping a place in the pages. Soul of the sky and the earth and the wind and the distances, she seemed somehow,—a picture for an artist!
She paused at his step behind her. Nathan paused also. He did not wish to frighten her. The woman turned. Slowly they inventoried one another, their eyes met.
Twenty-nine years were focussed in that moment.
The man saw his Woman of Vague Dreams before him in reality. She was straight as a Norway pine, exquisitely turned as a Venus de Medici, dark as a Castilian. She was fragile of ankle, strong of thigh, deep of breast, soft of shoulder.
On her finely chiseled and sensitive features lay a slight pallor. Her lips were half-parted. Great brown eyes were faintly startled, inquiring, lucid with an infinite delicacy and tenderness. She was a woman with a big soul! It was all there, on her features.
Madelaine beheld a man ten feet from her, unlike any man she had ever seen. He was a head taller than herself, agile of carriage, cordy of shoulder and bicep, sure of tread, controlled of muscle and nerve. His features were burned to the hue of brick. His gray eye carried as true as a rifle ball. And his mouth!—His lips were classic; every mean and petty thing he had risen above, every heckling trial he had met with infinite patience, every hell he had groped through because he believed that to go on was self-obligation and that somewhere above a sun must be shining gloriously, the whole long chronicle of what he had lived was all concentrated in two cable jaw muscles and the manner in which he closed his lips.
He also had calm eyes—now.
His strong, virile body, war-hardened, was clad in a uniform that indicated no rubber-stamp soldier. His khaki shirt was left loosely open at the throat, disclosing a chest as tough as leather. He wore his cap at a rakish, he-man angle and his forehead wound and bungling shoulder only accentuated his virility instead of making him clumsy.
The woman slowly viewed his face and his frame. And a queer thrill shot deep and true, far down into the innermost reaches of her being. Here was a MAN!
Two pairs of calm eyes met in that moment. Face to face, eye to eye, they looked upon each other and those glances held. Male and female, worthy of each other, made for each other, they met at high noon under an infinite cobalt sky on a spot as level and far-flung as the Tablelands of Eternity. And all around and about them was Sunshine. It had to be in the sunshine, that!