“Oh, all right,” said the Very Small Person, quite as though he had explained all this aloud. “But I guess we’ll have our dinner at half-past twelve. You just go right ahead until then and don’t mind me.”
She went into the kitchen and shut the door gently behind her.
That was how it began.
John Archibald had run away from New York—and from Nadine Ransome. The two had sapped his strength and dulled his spirit and blurred his vision. He loved them both—and, in much the same way, loved the beauty and the power and the indescribable, gripping charm of them; but the soul of him had run away from them before they had altogether had their way with it and had carried his fagged brain and struggling heart to a place where June was busy with a wonderful outdoor world.
There was a little shack on the edge of a wood, with a meadow dropping away from before the doorstep to join a quiet green valley that wandered narrowly between two lines of blue hills into dim, purple distances. He had camped there once, with a fellow artist, and, on a day when the city world was an ache in his brain and a bitterness in his heart, the winding, white ribbon of valley road and the upland meadow trail had called to him, the murmur of pine top seas and the drip of fern-hidden springs and the silences of green woodland dusks, had promised peace.
So he ran away.
Running away may not be heroic, but at times it is exceedingly wise.
The shack and the land upon which it stood belonged to a colony of Shakers who lived across the Valley among the heaven-climbing hills, and they rented it willingly but with mild amazement.
“Thee doesn’t intend to live in it?” asked the gray-clad eldress with the visioning eyes and the firm chin.
“When it rains,” explained the tenant. “The rest of the time I’ll live out of doors. I’m a painter.”