“A-alas! A comin' home.”
“Oh, shut up, Kid!”
“A-alas, a-alas!” The dark was split with red gashes, as it used to be in the field hospital. The rain whispered on the roof and the wet path glimmered like silk.
It was the village of Zoar, which lies far back to the west of Wyantenaug Valley, among low waves of hills, the house the old Hare Place, and Miss Elizabeth Hare and Gracia lived there behind the white gateway.
That gateway had once been an ancient arch overhead, with a green wooden ball topping it. Some one cut a face on the ball, that leered into the street. It did not in the least resemble Miss Elizabeth, whose smile was gentle and cool; but it was taken down from its station of half a century; and Gracia cried secretly, because everything would needs be disconsolate without an arch and a proper wooden ball on top of it, under which knights and witch ladies might come and go, riding and floating. It seemed to break down the old garden life. Odd flowers would not hold conversations any more, tiger-lilies and peonies bother each other, the tigers being snappish and the peonies fat, slow, and irritating. Before Gracia's hair had abandoned yellow braids and become mysterious, when she learned neat sewing and cross-stitch, she used to set the tigers and peonies quarrelling to express her own feelings about neat sewing and cross-stitch. Afterward she found the memory of that wickedness too heavy, and confessed it to Miss Elizabeth, and added the knights and witch ladies. Miss Elizabeth had said nothing, had seemed disinclined to blame, and, going out into the garden, had walked to and fro restlessly, stopping beside the tigers and peonies, and seeming to look at the arched gateway with a certain wistfulness.
Miss Elizabeth had now a dimly faded look, the charm of a still November, where now and then an Indian summer steals over the chill. She wore tiny white caps, and her hair was singularly smooth; while Gracia's appeared rather to be blown back, pushed by the delicate fingers of a breeze, that privately admired it, away from her eager face, with its gray-blue eyes that looked at you as if they saw something else as well. It kept you guessing about that other thing, and you got no further than to wonder if it were not something, or some one, that you might be, or might have been, if you had begun at it before life had become so labelled and defined, so plastered over with maxims.
The new gateway was still a doubtful quantity in Gracia's mind. It was not justified. It had no connections, no consecrations; merely a white gate against the greenery.
It was the whiteness which caught Sandy Cass's dulled eyes, so that he turned through, and lay down in the tool-house, and wondered which of a number of incongruous things was really happening: Little Irish crying plaintively that his legs were too short—“A-alas, a-alas!”—or the whisper of the rain on the roof.
Gracia lifted the white curtains, looked out, and saw the wet path shining.
“Is it raining, Gracia?”