He knew that he must move carefully into her thoughts. "I understand how that can be," he said, after a pause. "There was a place in Idaho that used to make me choke every time I passed it; I never knew why, until one day an English fellow happened to say as we rode by, 'Jove, there must be trout in that brook!' Then I knew it made me homesick, because every boy has something in him that makes him want to fish. I had wanted to, worst sort, when I was a youngster—though I was born in an inland city, and never had a chance to. It just made me homesick for the boyhood I ought to have had!"
Rosamund looked at him in amazement. Subtlety and imagination from Flood she had never foreseen; her own imagination was fired at once, and her face flushed a little with shame at what she had thought of him before. Flood looked straight ahead, but he was more keenly aware of the girl beside him than she of him. His heart was pounding as if he were setting out on a race; and indeed he beheld a stake before him as clearly as ever in his life. She answered, and he knew that he had scored; at last he had made her aware of him!
So well had they progressed by the time they had got back to town that he felt he could dare to say, before he left her, "I want to know those Maryland and Virginia woods of yours better, myself."
He wondered afterwards whether he had said too much.
XI
After the Westchester afternoon there were two dinners with Flood as host; and do what she would, she could not altogether escape his daily, almost hourly attentions, without wounding his feelings and her own. He did nothing she might not accept without in the least seeming to bind herself by any obligation; the very intensity of his love urged him to caution. But when he suggested to Cecilia that, since her sister had decided to go down by train, he should perhaps be going as far as Washington on the same day, he would have divined Cecilia better if he had not been so absorbed in his dreams of Rosamund; for Mrs. Maxwell's ambitions had enlarged since early summer, and she did not hesitate to divulge his plan. Rosamund was to have taken the Congressional; instead, she slipped away at nine o'clock; so anxious was she to put distance between herself and Flood, that she would not even wait for Eleanor.
On the way down, she wondered at something in Cecilia's expression when she had made known her intention of running away from Flood's companionship, but there was too much else in her mind to permit of her spending much thought upon those she had just left; there was a warmth in her heart as of the traveler's returning to the land of his affection. She had called New York her home for most of her life, and lived in the mountains three months; yet behind her she left little that she loved, and before her lay smiling fields of imagination; and she found the vision sweet. She planned the placing of the furniture in the little house, made out a list of the things that should go in each room, and wondered what she had forgotten. She was carrying little presents back with her, and she took them out of her bag, opened their boxes to make sure they were quite right, put them back into their wrappings, and with the pencil on her chatelaine wrote messages on each. Only for Ogilvie she had no gift; she had spent more time in hunting something for him than in choosing her dining-room furniture, and had come away with—nothing! There was really nothing in all New York that she could take back to the doctor!
When he met her at the little station in the October darkness of early evening, she looked about for Yetta and Tim.
"I thought you would bring the children to welcome me!" she exclaimed, and was glad that she had it to say.