Blythe, flushing embarrassedly, was holding up a protesting hand when the surrey drew up in front of the clean, scrubbed porch and the care-taker's wife, a freshly-ginghamed, bright-eyed German woman of middle age, appeared to receive them. Then, from around the left side of the house, a terrific yipping began. Two hysterically joyous fox terriers, scenting their master, came tearing around the porch and literally leaped upon Blythe. Then they "side-wheeled" in circles over the lawn, first listing precariously over on starboard legs and then on port, whimpering in their sheer delight as they tore around. A huge Angora cat, as they entered the hall, made two bounds of it from the huge fireplace, from which a pair of smouldering logs diffused a red glow that contrasted oddly with the streaming sunlight, to rub her sides, purring almost vociferously as she did so, against Blythe's trousers legs. Later in the day, she was solemnly to conduct Blythe and his guests to the cellar for the purpose of exhibiting a litter which kept the women chained around the basket for nearly an hour.
In the lives of most men and women there are days—usually unanticipated days—so encompassed, aureoled, by a memorable happiness that, ever afterward, in hours of retrospection, they mark the beginning or denote the closing of the eventful periods.
This was such a day for Blythe and Louise and Laura. They rambled through miles of field and forest, chattering and laughing like children a-berrying; the women's hair blowing free or tumbling down altogether, their skirts caught by brambles, their deadliest fears aroused by the inevitable ruminative cow. They climbed fences, while Blythe pretended that something had just dropped out of his pocket back of him. They romped with the dogs, they tossed pebbles at a mark in a garrulous little just-thawed stream, they even sat down on an inviting little mound, beneath an old elm, and played at mumblety-peg with Blythe's jack-knife and quarrelled laughingly over the score of the game.
When they returned to the house in mid-afternoon, they found the German woman preparing a meal for them. Laura and Louise insisted upon helping her. In fact, they banished her from the kitchen altogether and did it all themselves. Louise announced, her features set rather determinedly, that she was going to make some biscuits, whereupon Blythe, asking her if she'd learned that in the cooking class at Miss Mayhew's school, incontinently fled in well-simulated alarm. But he came back to the spotless kitchen to watch the two women, aproned to the neck, and their arms bared to the shoulders, breeze about with their preparations. He was repaid for his inquisitiveness by being swaddled in an apron and set to peel the potatoes.
The meal was an unqualified success, including the biscuits, which, to Louise's intense surprise, were superb, although Blythe impertinently maintained that the German woman really had made them and that Louise had merely heated them over. The light began to fall as they chatted around the table, and Blythe, having no great liking for oil lamps, tossed logs on to the dining-room fireplace for the flickering glow of their light. Blythe lighted a cigar with his coffee and fell into a silence of content when Louise and Laura began to hum, very low, snatches of old songs in unison; Laura in her deep, moving contralto, with an appealing little "break" in it, and Louise in a clear, sweet soprano—she had been the honor girl of her school for her singing.
"More," Blythe would give the repressed command when they ceased; and they would willingly obey. After a while, darkness having quite fallen, Laura went to another part of the house for her after-dinner cigarette. She made it a practice not to take her cigarettes in the presence of quite young women.
Blythe, silent enough now, and his silence tacitly concurred in by Louise, who also had become preoccupied, under the spell of the flickering fire-light and her nearness, alone, to a man who made a strong appeal to her imagination, brought up a deep leather chair before the logs and motioned to Louise to take it. But she pulled an old-fashioned three-legged footstool before the fire, and Blythe himself had to take the chair. Thus they sat silent for a while, listening to the sputtering of the green logs.
"Louise."
It was the first time he had called her that. But she did not even turn her head. She was sitting near him on the low stool, chin in palm, her face illumined by the fire's glow. It was agreeable to hear him call her Louise. He knew her father. She had been thinking of her father while she and Laura were singing softly.
"Yes," she said, quietly.