Wings of the Wind

by Credo Fitch Harris

"That may get you out of it now," I announced, "but when we reach the yacht I'm going to teach you ten hours a day. Understand?—ten hours a day!"

Again came the tantalizing expression, as she daintily caught her skirt and made me a royal curtsey, saying:

"It's beyond all measure charming of you, Chancellor. But shall I be so difficult?"

"Don't joke about a wonderful prospect," I answered. "You're difficult because of your grace, not the lack of it—if that's what you mean!" But from her indifferent way of dismissing the subject I judged it was not what she had meant, at all.

The sun must have set while we were encircling my pool. Then we passed on into a still denser growth, following a crooked path that led to the fort—entering a mysterious shadow-land that twilights have the trick of producing when overhead foliage shuts out the afterglow and the serene forest gloom is painted in tones of gray. The soft earth we trod was dark, and the water lay phantom-like in its black bowl. Except for the few times I held aside a swinging wildwood vine for her to pass, we might have been two drifting spirits—so quietly did we move, and so unknowingly were we affected by the hour, the place.

At the edge of our forest, where that long ago prairie fire had blighted a grove of palm trees that subsequently fell upon each other like an entangled pile of jackstraws, she took my hand to get across and, freed from the clinging shadows, we ran out beneath the sky—then gasped in amazement at its splendor.

It was not a sunset, not an afterglow in the usual sense of afterglows, but a sky of deep, smouldering red equally distributed from horizon to horizon; as though everywhere below the world a conflagration raged. I could not at first speak for the grandeur of it, and when I turned to her words were again checked by the look upon her face. For this dull, permeating glow—this enchantment from the heavens—touched her brow, her cheeks, her parted lips, with a light that aroused in me a thousand devils and a thousand gods; it lingered over her hair as if striving to concentrate itself into a halo there; and in her eyes that gazed afar were suggested the awakening of deeper fires, of wilder mysteries.

"God, what a sky," I at last exclaimed, through sheer panic at the imminence of crying aloud my love for her.

"What a sky, O God," she whispered, delicately turning my profane outburst to a sigh of thankfulness.

But, better than she, I knew the meaning of that sky. I knew that down over the western edge of the world blazed a huge funeral pyre on which my past was being changed to harmless ashes; while in the east flames were already lighted beneath the on-coming crucible of destiny, from whose purifying heat a new love arose. Farther into obscurity would sink the one; up and on would come the other; and so the sky was now roseate unto its zenith, reflecting the glory of these miracles. I followed the look of her eyes and saw, high against the red, a lone crane flying majestically homeward to the seclusion of his swamp; and it typified my own belated heart that, without questioning the whence or why, unerringly obeyed a silent voice which called it to another sanctuary.