Mrs. Carruth, found paling a little, and thought to be less strong since her accident abroad, had been ordered to the seaside some three or four weeks before the usual flitting of the family. Helen accompanied her; the Professor ran down as often as he might, till Anniversary Week should set him free to move his ponderously increasing manuscript on the “Errors in the Revised Version” from Cesarea to the clam study. The long lace curtains blew in and out of the windows of the Flying Jib; Helen’s dory glittered in two coats of fresh pale-yellow paint upon the float; and Helen, in pretty summer gowns of corn color, or violet, or white, listened on the piazza for the foot-ring of her lover. She was lovely that spring, with the loveliness of youth and joy. Bayard watched her through a mist of that wonder and that worship which mark the highest altitudes of energy in a man’s life. It was said that he had never wrought for Windover, in all his lonely time of service there, as he did in those few glorified weeks.
It is pleasant to think that the man had this draught of human rapture; that he tasted the brim of such joy as only the high soul in the ardent nature knows.
Helen offered him her tenderness with a sweet reserve, alternating between compassion for what he had suffered, and moods of pretty, coquettish economy of his present privilege, that taunted and enraptured him by turns. He floated on clouds; he trod on the summer air.
Their marriage was appointed for September: it was Helen’s wish to wait till then; and he submitted with such gentleness as it wrung her heart, afterwards, to remember.
“We will have one perfectly happy summer,” she pleaded. “People can be lovers but once.”
“And newly wed but once,” he answered gravely.
“Dear,” said Helen, with troubled eyes, “it shall be as you say. You shall decide.”
“God will decide it,” replied the lover unexpectedly.
His eyes had a look which Helen could not follow. She felt shut out from it; and both were silent.