Even now while we laughed, we thought we might as well laugh at everything we could think of, and get just that much finished and out of the way.
"Perhaps," said the Partridge Hunter, "perhaps the Blue Serge Man was glad to see Amy, and perhaps he was rattled, no one can tell. But I'll wager anything he was awfully mad to see Gruff. There were lots of meteors last June, I remember. I understand now. It was the Blue Serge Man raking down the stars to pelt at Gruff."
"Gruff was a very—nice dog," I insisted.
"He was a very growly dog," acceded the Partridge Hunter.
"If you growl all the time, it's almost the same as a purr," I argued.
The Partridge Hunter smiled a little, but not very generously. Something was on his mind. "Poor little Amy," he said. "Any man-and-woman game is playing with fire, but it's foolish to think that there are only two kinds, just Hearth-Fire and Hell-Fire. Why, there's 'Student-lamp' and 'Cook-stove' and 'Footlights.' Amy and the Blue Serge Man were playing with 'Footlights,' I guess. She needed an audience. And he was New York to her, great, blessed, shiny, rackety New York. I believe she loved Alrik. He must have been a pretty picturesque figure on that first and only time when he blazed his trail down Broadway. But happy with him—h-e-r-e? Away from New York? Five years? In just green and brown woods where the posies grow on the ground instead of on hats, and even the Christmas trees are trimmed with nothing except real snow and live squirrels? G-l-o-r-y! Of course her chest caved in. There wasn't kinky air enough in the whole state of Maine to keep her kind of lungs active. Of course she starved to death. She needed her meat flavored with harp and violin; her drink aerated with electric lights. We might have done something for her if we'd liked her just a little bit better. But I didn't even know her till I heard that she was dead."
He jumped up suddenly and helped me to my feet. Something in my face must have stricken him. "Would you like my warm hand to walk home with?" he finished quite abruptly.
Even as he offered it, one of those chill, quick autumn changes came over the October woods. The sun grayed down behind huge, windy clouds. The leaves began to shiver and shudder and chatter, and all the gorgeous reds and greens dulled out of the world, leaving nothing as far as the eye could reach but dingy squirrel-colors, tawny grays and dusty yellows, with the far-off, panting sound of a frightened brook dodging zigzag through some meadow in a last, desperate effort to escape winter. As a draft from a tomb the cold, clammy, valley twilight was upon us.
Like two bashful children scuttling through a pantomime, we hurried out of the glowery, darkening woods, and then at the edge of the meadow broke into a wild, mirthful race for Alrik's bright hearth-fire, which glowed and beckoned from his windows like a little tame, domesticated sunset. The Partridge Hunter cleared the porch steps at a single bound, but I fell flat on the bruising doormat.
Nothing really mattered, however, except the hearth-fire itself.