Spring and no birds, she thought sadly, gathering her few wild flowers when the cows had gone home that second afternoon. She strained her eyes down the driveway, Blankness. Blankness everywhere. At the house, misery.
The old fairy tales came to her mind. Tales where the captive princess pines and hopes alternately.
"'On the second day all happened as before,'" she murmured in quotation. It was always on the third day that something really came to pass, she remembered, and she scanned the sky for threatening clouds. Ah, if it should rain to-morrow and the leaden hours should drag by in that odious house! After having indulged a ray of hope, such a prospect seemed unbearable.
In her rôle of trusty she had constrained herself to civility. She had taken Mrs. Carder the flowers last night, and Rufus had put some tiny blooms in his buttonhole and caressed them at supper-time with significant glances at her.
When she awoke on the following day her first move was to the window with an anxious look at the sky. As soon as she was satisfied that it was not threatening, a reaction set in to her thought. She always hastened to dress in the morning, for her compassion for Mrs. Carder made her hurry to her assistance. Pete's eyes in this few days had taken on a seeing look and he worked with energy to follow every direction of his golden-haired goddess. In the kitchen he did not avoid her eyes, and the smiles he received from her were the only sunbeams that had ever come into his life.
She was in many minds that morning about going again to the meadow. It seemed so absurd, so humiliating to costume herself as for private theatricals, and to go repeatedly to keep a tryst which the other party, and that a man, had forgotten.
Would the princess in the fairy tale do so? she wondered; but then if she had not persisted the story could never have been written.
"Ain't you sick o' that meadow and the cows?" asked Rufus at the dinner-table. "Hadn't you better go drivin' to-day? I've got an errand to the village and just as lieve do it myself as send one o' the men if you'll go."
Geraldine, the two braids of her hair brought up around her head in a golden wreath that rested on fluffy waves, was looking more than usually appealing, he thought, and he congratulated himself on the restraint with which he was allowing her mind to work on the proposition he had made to her. She was evidently becoming more normal, finding herself as it were. Those flashes of red and white that had passed across her face in her intensity of feeling had ceased. Her voice was steady and civil.
"The meadow seems to agree with me," she answered. "Why should my not going with you prevent you from doing your errand at the village?"