Then this stage, it was the world she had dreamed of—the world where there lived a wholly new kind of people—people who could make room for her. She thrilled, and her heart beat wildly. In a strangely quiet, intense voice, she said:
"I want to try. I'm sure I'll get along there. I'll work—Oh, so hard. I'll do anything!"
"That's the talk," cried he. "You've got the stuff in you."
She said little the rest of the journey. Her mind was busy with the idea he had by merest accident given her. If he could have looked in upon her thoughts, he would have been amazed and not a little alarmed by the ferment he had set up.
Where they reached the river the bank was mud and thick willows, the haunt of incredible armies of mosquitoes. "It's a mystery to me," cried he, "why these fiends live in lonely places far away from blood, when they're so mad about it." After some searching he found a clear stretch of sandy gravel where she would be not too uncomfortable while he was gone for a boat. He left the horse with her and walked upstream in the direction of Brooksburg. As he had warned her that he might be gone a long time, he knew she would not be alarmed for him—and she had already proved that timidity about herself was not in her nature. But he was alarmed for her—this girl alone in that lonely darkness—with light enough to make her visible to any prowler.
About an hour after he left her he returned in a rowboat he had borrowed at the water mill. He hitched the horse in the deep shadow of the break in the bank. She got into the boat, put on the slip and the sunbonnet, put her sailor hat in the bag. They pushed off and he began the long hard row across and upstream. The moon was high now and was still near enough to its full glory to pour a flood of beautiful light upon the broad river—the lovely Ohio at its loveliest part.
"Won't you sing?" he asked.
And without hesitation she began one of the simple familiar love songs that were all the music to which the Sutherland girls had access. She sang softly, in a deep sweet voice, sweeter even than her speaking voice. She had the sunbonnet in her lap; the moon shone full upon her face. And it seemed to him that he was in a dream; there was nowhere a suggestion of reality—not of its prose, not even of its poetry. Only in the land no waking eye has seen could such a thing be. The low sweet voice sang of love, the oars clicked rhythmically in the locks and clove the water with musical splash; the river, between its steep hills, shone in the moonlight, with a breeze like a friendly spirit moving upon its surface. He urged her, and she sang another song, and another. She sighed when she saw the red lantern on the Carrollton wharf; and he, turning his head and seeing, echoed her sigh.
"The first chance, you must sing me that song," she said.
"From 'Rigoletto'? I will. But—it tells how fickle women are—'like a feather in the wind.'. . . They aren't all like that, though—don't you think so?"