The answer came promptly. “Because you paid me compliments. You thought that God said to Himself when He made me, ‘I’ll make the most beautiful person I’ve ever made.’—Hulloa! You don’t like that. It wasn’t quite what you expected. What did you expect? Until you tell me I won’t speak to you.”
Compelled by her silence, he confessed, “I did hope that you might have remembered me for something—something more romantic. You see, we met in the Haunted Wood, and there was the river, and you were going to drown yourself. You’d taken off your shoes and stockings as a first step, which was very economical of you. And I—I saw your feet, and——”
She waved her handkerchief at him, her eyes a-sparkle. “I know. I know. Very pretty and very foolish!” She rose. “We ought to be going.”
Outside the Red Lion, she turned toward the river; “I left my boat at one of the landings.”
When they had found it and he had helped her in, she said, “You can row, I suppose? All right, then, I’ll steer; you take the sculls.”
They drifted down with the stream, the gray bridge, spanning the river, growing more distant behind them; the wooded hills swimming up on every side to form a green cup, against which the sky stooped its lips. They floated by lazy craft, in which women lay back on cushions beneath sunshades and men with bare arms clasped about their knees watched them. Snatches of laughter reached them, to which the murmur of voices droned an accompaniment. On green lawns, beneath dreaming garden trees, little groups of brightly attired people clustered. From houseboats along the river-bank stole music, one air creeping into another as they passed, fashioning a medley—coon songs from America, Victorian ballads of sentiment, a wild scrap of Dvorak and the latest impertinence from London. Of all that they saw and heard, they alone were constant in the shifting landscape.
“After four years!” she murmured.
He stopped rowing and gazed at her wonderingly, repeating her words, “After four years!”
Then a familiar voice leapt out at them from a sky-blue house-boat, with sky-blue curtains fluttering in the windows and a rim of scarlet geraniums running round it in boxes. The voice lent the touch of humor to their tenderness, which saves sentiment from sadness and makes it ecstatic. It sang to the twinkling tones of a mandolin, struck sharply:
“Come, tickle me here;