Now and then, as he climbed, he caught, through opening among the trees, sudden glimpses of the Valley where the long shadows of late afternoon were flinging themselves across the sunlit breast of the meadow land, and of the range of hills beyond, still gold and green and blue, but with prophetic splashes of deepening purple creeping in and out among the ravines and hollows.
He would be in time to see the sunset from the top of Pine Knob and, at the thought, something Pegeen had said days before flashed into his mind. There was “a place up there where you could look out and out,” and the Smiling Lady often went there to watch the sunset.
Archibald told himself that it would be a pleasant thing to find her there. She was the sort of woman with whom one could watch a miracle.
And so when, pushing aside a screen of thick crowding leaves, he found her sitting on a mossy stone, elbow on knee, chin in hand, eyes a-dream, he was not surprised, only glad that the human note could intrude on Nature’s melody without discord. She fitted in.
“You’re just in time,” she said, looking up at him for an instant in friendly fashion. Then her eyes went back to the fields and hills and sky.
She had a curious way of making one feel welcome without bothering to put the thing into words. Archibald remembered that it had been the same when he had found her in the birch wood.—There had been the same undisturbed acceptance of his coming, the same companionable assumption of his content. There was no aloofness about her mood. Before she had been absorbed in frolicking with babies. Now she was absorbed in the sunset. She took his interest in the babies and in the sunset for granted, shared them with him, and felt that she had fulfilled her duty. There was something oddly intimate about such a welcome. Archibald puzzled over it, as he dropped on the moss beside her and ostensibly gave his undivided attention to the sunset. If she had been startled or formal or coquettish or resentful—those were the beginnings of acquaintance between a man and a woman; but this girl’s life and his might have been running side by side for years. All the futile, tentative things might have been said so long ago that they could be forgotten. There was suggestion of a long lane traversed, of barriers passed, about this taking-for-granted companioning. And yet the splendid simplicity of it put a man in his place, made him feel humbly grateful, eager to be found worthy. He wondered whether she met all strangers in the same way.
As though she had heard his thoughts, the girl turned to him for a moment, looked at him frankly, appraisingly.
“One knows that you won’t spoil it,” she said, the ripple of light that was like the soul of a smile running over her face.
So that was it? Archibald felt enormously flattered. To be recognized at sight by a girl with a smile like that as the sort of man who would not spoil beautiful things, seemed exceedingly worth while. To be good enough for Pegeen and to be understanding enough for the Smiling Lady—honors were coming thick and fast upon him.
And then he justified the girl’s faith in him by quite forgetting her in the glory of the sunset world.