Moore had learned many things, in these months that had gone; and so had Lucy. And so had Johnny Dree. Lucy was teaching him a thing he had never had time to learn; she was teaching him to play. When snow came, he brought her, one day, snow-shoes; and thereafter they occasionally tramped the woods together, following the meandering trails of the small creatures of the forest, marking where a partridge had left a delicate tracery of footprints in the snow, exploring the great swamp below the hill where the cedars had been stripped of browse by the moose that wintered there. He found where deer were yarded, and took her to the place, and once they caught glimpses of the startled creatures, bounding away through the cumbering snow. There was a deepening understanding between these two; when they were together she talked almost constantly, and he scarce at all; but she could read his silences, and he understood her fountain-like loquacity. Through a keener understanding, she found matters to love in these hills and woods which were his world; she was, by slow degrees, forgetting the more obvious pleasures of her life before she came to Fraternity to dwell. They were, for the most part, as much isolated as though they lived upon an island in the sea; for, save for the nightly gatherings at Will Bissell’s store, Fraternity folk are not overly social in their inclinations. Once he took her to a grange dance, and she found him surprisingly adequate in this new rôle, found an unsuspected pleasure in the rustic merry-making she would, two years before, have scorned. Johnny did not smoke, and she asked him why; he said he didn’t want to waste the money. Yet once when he went to East Harbor, he brought her a flower, in a pot; and when she asked him if that wasn’t wasting money, he smiled a little and said he did not think it was. One day, to torment him, she cried: “I’d give a lot for a cigarette. I haven’t had one for days. Will you get me some, next time you’re at the store. I don’t dare buy them there.”
Johnny merely smiled at her and replied: “I guess if you ever did smoke them, you don’t any more.”
One day her snow-shoe caught on a broken stub and threw her forward into the snow. She said: “Oh, damn!” More in jest than in anger. Lifting her to her feet, he commented:
“I shouldn’t think a girl would swear much.”
“I like to,” she insisted. “It makes me feel good when I’m mad.”
“I never could see it helped me any,” he rejoined, mildly enough. But she thereafter guarded her tongue, until the necessity for restraint had disappeared. Self discipline was one of the things she learned from Johnny.
You could hardly say they had a romance. They grew together, as naturally as stock and scion grafted by his skilful hands. They had this great community of interest in the trees which were his work, which she had come to love. Their forward looking eyes were centered on the harvest time, now a scant year away, when the fruition of their labors could be expected; and their anticipations were tranquil and serene.
They talked, sometimes, of what he meant to make of his life. “You won’t always be a farmer, will you?” she asked.
“I guess I will,” he told her.
“Slaving away here!”