When Bonny and Ned Marshall had mounted and ridden happily away in the dusk, Sally came back with me from the door, and stood, silent and pensive, for a moment, while she stroked my arm.
"You look tired, Ben. If you only wouldn't work so hard."
"I must work. It's the only thing I'm good for."
"But I see so little of you and—and I get so lonely."
"When I've won out, I'll stop, and then you shall see me every living minute of the day, if you choose."
"That's so far off, and it's now I want you. I'd like you to take me away, Ben—to take me somewhere just as you did when we were married."
Her face was very soft in the firelight, and stooping, I kissed her cheek as she looked up at me, with a grave, almost pensive smile on her lips.
"I wish I could, sweetheart, but I'm needed here so badly that I don't dare run off for a day. You've married a working-man, and he's obliged to stick to his place."
She said nothing more to persuade me, but from that evening until the spring, when our son was born, it seemed to me that she retreated farther and farther into that pale dream distance where I had first seen and desired her. With the coming of the child I got her back to earth and to reality, and when the warm little body, wrapped in flannels, was first placed in my arms, it seemed to me that the thrill of the mere physical contact had in it something of the peculiar starlike radiance of my bridal night. Sally, lying upon the pillow under a blue satin coverlet, smiled up at me with flushed cheeks and eyes shining with love, and while I stood there, some divine significance in her look, in her helplessness, in the oneness of the three of us drawn together in that little circle of life, moved my heart to the faint quiver of apprehension that had come to me while I stood by her side before the altar in old Saint John's.
When she was well, and the long, still days of the summer opened, little Benjamin was wrapped in a blue veil and taken in Aunt Euphronasia's arms to visit Miss Mitty in the old grey house.