The Governor obediently sat down and went to work. “I am moved to offer thanks that we are not as the beasts that have four legs,” he remarked thoughtfully. “I shouldn't care to fill stockings for quadrupeds, Betty.”
“Why, you goose, there's only one stocking for each child.”
“Ah, but with four feet our expectations might be doubled,” suggested the Governor. “You can't convince me that it isn't a merciful providence, my dear.”
When the stockings were filled and the packages neatly tied up and separated, Uncle Shadrach came with a hamper, and Betty went out to the kitchen to prepare for the morning gathering of the field hands and their families. Returning after the work was over, she lingered a moment in the path to the house, looking far across the white country. The snow had ceased, and a single star was shining, through a rift in the scudding clouds, straight overhead. From the northwest the wind blew hard, and the fleecy covering on the ground was fast freezing a foot deep in ice. With a shiver she drew her cloak about her and ran indoors and upstairs to where Virginia lay asleep in the high, white bed.
In the great brick fireplace the logs had fallen apart, and she softly pushed them together again as she threw on a knot of resinous pine. The blaze shot up quickly, and blowing out the candle upon the bureau, she undressed by the firelight, crooning gently as she did so in a voice that was lower than the singing flames. With the glow on her bared arms and her hair unbound upon her shoulders, she sat close against the chimney; and while Virginia slept in the tester bed, went dreaming out into the night.
At first her dreams went back into her childhood, and somehow, she knew not why, she could not bring back her childhood but Dan came with it. She fancied herself in all kinds of impossible places, but she had no sooner got safely into them than she looked up and Dan was there before her, standing very still and laughing at her with his eyes. It was the same thing even when she was a baby. Her earliest memory was of a May morning when they took her out into a field of buttercups, and told her that she might pluck her arms full if she could, and then, as she stretched out her little hands and began to gather very fast, she looked across to where the waving yellow buttercups stood up against the blue spring sky. That memory had always been her own before; but now, when she went back to it, she knew that all the time she had been gathering buttercups for Dan. And she had plucked faster and faster only that she might have a bigger bunch for him when the gathering was done. She saw herself working bonnetless in the sunshine, her baby face red, her lips breathless, working so hard, she did not know for whom. Oh, how funny that he should have been somewhere all the time!
And again on the day when they gave her her first doll, and she let it fall and cried her heart out over its broken pink face. She knew, at last, that somewhere in that ugly town Dan had dropped his toy; and it was for that she was crying, not for her own poor doll. Yes, all her life she had had two griefs to weep for, and two joys to be glad over. She had been really a double self from her babyhood up—from her babyhood up! It had been always up, up, up—like a lark that rises to the sun. She had all her life been rising to the sun, and she was warmed at last.
Then she asked herself if it were happiness, after all, this new restlessness of hers. The melancholy of the early spring was there—the roving impulse that comes on April afternoons when the first buds are on the trees and the air is keen with the smell of the newly turned earth. She felt that it was time for the spring to come again; she wanted to walk alone in the woods and to watch the swallows flying from the north. And again she wanted only to lie close upon the hearth and to hear the flames leap up the chimney. One of her selves cried to be up and roaming; the other to turn over on the rug and sleep again.
But gradually her thoughts returned to him, and she went over, bit by bit, what he had said last evening, asking herself if he had meant much at this time, or little at another. It seemed to her that she found new meanings now in things that she had once overlooked. She read words in his eyes which he had never spoken; and, one by one, she brought back each sentence, each look, each gesture, holding it up to her remembrance, and laying it aside to give place to the next. Oh, there were so many, so many!
And then from the past her dreams went groping out into the future, becoming dimmer, and shaping themselves into unreal forms. Scattered visions came drifting through her mind,—of herself in romantic adventures, and of Dan—always of Dan—appearing like the prince in the fairy tale, at the perilous moment. She saw herself on the breast of a great river, borne, while she stretched her hands at a white rose-bush blooming in the clouds, to a cataract which she could not see, though she heard its thunder far ahead. She tried to call, but no sound came, for the water filled her mouth. The river went on and on, and the falling of the cataract was in her ears, when she felt Dan's arm about her, and saw his eyes laughing at her above the waters.