The windows were open to the night. The weather had turned suddenly warm that day, as if the old earth had decided to start life all over again with the Briggses. There was a moon, and the new tender leaves of the aspens about the cabin made patterns on it that twinkled. You could almost feel the soft wooly anemones thrusting up their oval spear points outside.
The feel of it all had got into Rosie’s heart and driven out some of her fears. She even had her old banjo in her lap. She wanted to prove to him that she meant to help him to be happy. She touched the strings and began to sing.
She knew only the songs that had been popular a good while ago—“Daisy”, “Two Little Girls in Blue”, “Sweet Rosie O’Grady” and one or two more of the same sort. These, to her, were “music”—all there was of it. She sang:
“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true.
I’m half crazy, just for the love of you . . .”
and felt a load slipping from her heart as the snow slips from the summit of Gray Dome Mountain when warm weather comes.
“Gosh!” Jim murmured. “You ain’t sung that sence—”
He let the sentence die. His eyes smiled above his grizzling brown mustache and beard. She wanted to put down the banjo and go to him and touch his hand. But she went on singing, pleased that she remembered the tune so well, that her voice rang out so clear and true, and Jim came and sat close beside her.
A strange, deliciously sweet odor crept in under the smells of growing things and wet earth out there on the dripping mountainside. She felt just then that Jim was as steadfast and as sure to stand by as the huge silver spruce that the cabin was built against. She let her cheek rest on the shoulder of his coat.
“It won’t be a stylish marriage,
For I can’t afford a carriage . . .”
The odor came more strongly. It was like orange flowers. She smiled at the sentimental notion. Orange flowers on the side of Gray Dome—