“He is worthy of what he can win,” the girl said gently.
“Nothing less Delphic than that for a man with the nine drops on his lips?” Archibald urged. She shook her head.
“There’s no promise that the water will give him whatever he happens to want,” she said. “He’s to win his heart’s desire; but he must prove that he knows the one desire of his heart and is worthy of it, before it is given to him.—That’s the way I’d read the riddle.”
He thought it over and nodded assent.
“That’s fair—but when he has proved it?—”
She sprang to her feet and stood looking out over the Valley.
“Then he will meet the Wonderful Thing,” she said. She laughed as she said it, striving to put their talk back into the realm of whimsy; but her eyes were very sweet, and looking down into them the man, who had risen and stood beside her, had a vague glimpse of the Wonderful Thing coming to meet him along mysterious, enchanted ways.
They rode home through the sunset, and Archibald stayed for supper in the house among the maples, but after that moment on the hilltop, their talk was all of impersonal things. The girl led and the man followed. They discussed the advisability of draining the east meadow and the probable effect of spraying the cabbages with kerosene emulsion and the Valley’s need of a social center. Not for an instant was sentiment allowed to show its head, yet Archibald went back to the shack with a singing heart He wakened the next morning with an odd sense of having journeyed in a far country and come back to a familiar world where all was not quite as it had been before his going; and, puzzling over the change, he came face to face with the truth. He was in love with the Smiling Lady. He had been in love with her ever since his first glimpse of her; but it had taken Witch Hill magic to clear the fog from his brain. He sprang from bed hastily, eager to be up and about, in a world new made; and Pegeen, in the kitchen, heard him whistling gaily as he dressed. The past clutched at him and he shook it off with a laugh. Ghosts were foolish, futile things—but his whistle ceased abruptly on a high note as, looking eagerly into the future, he was confronted by a man with graying hair and tired eyes. He had forgotten Meredith; and, for a moment, the thought of him sluiced his warm happiness with chilling doubt; but he shook it off, too. Hadn’t the nine drops touched his lips and wasn’t he sure now, sure beyond possibility of mistake, that he knew his heart’s desire?
His mood of exultant happiness lasted until he met Nora Moran again. Then its glad certainty wavered and doubts came creeping in; for things, in the prosaic Valley world, were not as they had been on Witch Hill. In some mysterious way, his lady had clothed herself in aloofness. It was not that she was not kind. There was nothing of which he could take hold, nothing of which he could demand an explanation. She was very friendly, very gracious, but the old intimacy was lacking and not, by any force or strategy, could he manage to see her alone. For some reason, she had gone within herself and gently closed the door; and, though he rebelled against her withdrawal, he was afraid he understood it. She had taken alarm, there beside the Witch’s Well, had realized that he wanted more than friendship, and, being promised to another man— Yes; that must be it. She was not free and she wanted to warn him in time, before there could be need of words, before he could give her face to his heart’s desire and take the wrong road for happiness.
That was like the Smiling Lady. She was no cheap coquette. It was not in her to deal unfairly. If she had given her love, even if she had given only her promise to some one else, then she was doing only what a woman like her would do; and he must accept it as a man she could make her friend would accept it. Only—there was a chance that he was misreading her mood, that gossip was wrong, that Meredith was nothing more to her than an old and dear friend. While there was a doubt, one might fight against exile.