Black Dick, strutting and fluttering before the workshop, seemed to be telling her, before she could run across the grass to the door, that something of great moment was going on inside. David was busy with his back toward her, a very jubilant and excited David, still in the damp, bedraggled clothes of last night’s adventures, but whistling gayly and handling wrench and hammer as though life itself depended on his speed. He looked at her over his shoulder, smiling his widest and happiest smile.
“Don’t go,” he said, breathless and eager, “don’t go. Something—something is just going to happen!”
There was the snapping of a switch and the slow creak of a lever that had not recently been moved. Then followed a faint and rising hum, a whir of wheels grew louder and deeper, that filled the death-like silence of the room with gay song, that sounded over the garden and through the house, that reached the ears of the invalid upstairs and made him stir and smile and open his eyes.
Betsey listened enthralled, too filled with breathless delight to heed any other sound. Yet the gate from the lane was flung hastily and noisily open and a man in uniform came striding up the path. She did not even heed when Dick, with joyous cawing, spread wide black wings to fly to the stranger’s shoulder, she only looked up, startled, to see him standing in the inner hallway beyond the workshop door. There was something of Miss Miranda in his bearing, something of her spirit in his dancing eyes. And his voice, somehow, had a faint ring of her father’s when he called up the stair, the same familiar call, but with no note of worried helplessness like Mr. Reynolds’, only the ringing tidings of a brother’s long-desired homecoming—
“Miranda, oh, Miranda.”
CONCLUSION
The summer had slipped away, the garden on the hillside was golden instead of green and old white Dobbin was plowing for autumn’s sowing instead of spring’s. Michael, possessed still of a slight limp and a scar on his seamed forehead, but hale and lusty as before, dug among the potatoes and had no one to tempt him from his habitual silence. Miss Miranda was busy elsewhere and as for Elizabeth and David, the garden and the yellow fields knew them no more.
Betsey’s father had come home and had set up his housekeeping in the college town so that he and his daughter need not be separated again. Aunt Susan also had returned, laden with souvenirs, curios, new clothes, and glorious accounts of what she had seen. The descriptions, however, like her collection of photographs, were apt to become a little jumbled when brought out for exhibition, so that Betsey was never really quite certain whether Bermuda was chiefly delightful for its mountain ranges or its shopping, or whether Lake Louise, a marvel of scenic wonder as she understood, was situated in the Canadian Rockies or the Garden of the Gods. As a result she could not feel any sharp or definite regret for what she had missed.
The completed invention had brought Miss Miranda’s father both fame and fortune, even as his scientist friend had prophesied, and what was better, had won him back to health. The first result of its success was that the ruined walls of the old house had vanished and the big, gray, beautiful building was going up again under the hands of an army of workmen. Mr. Reynolds could be seen upon the lawn, superintending mildly with Miss Miranda at his side, a very changed and happy Miss Miranda who seemed to love watching one stone replaced above another as though each were a miracle. When Elizabeth and David should come back for the first vacation of their college year, the house would be under roof at least, so that warm red tiles and sharp gable-lines would be reflected in the pool on the lawn. There would be scarlet leaves floating in the water then, and dry, brown grass nodding at the edge and, on quiet evenings, there would rock upon the ripples the shining stars of Orion or the laughing Pleiades.
That time, however, was still distant, for Betsey and David were entering, this morning, on their first day of college. They had journeyed from Harwood and came up from the station together, but now stood near the great gray arch that led to the main campus, at the place where they must part. The Scientific School, where David was to enter, stood just across the road, showing a brick-columned entrance-way with heavy iron gates and a hurrying throng passing out and in. The two had been discussing the future year most earnestly when they set out, but the talk had languished and they had fallen quite silent now. Hundreds of people, it seemed, were hastening past them, all young, all eager, all absorbed in their varied errands.