“Mr. Withers takes an interest in everything,” Mrs. Burns had remarked. “He’s an exceptionally fine young man. There’s just one thing that’s spoiling his work a little. He’s very much in love with Miss Evison. You can imagine how seriously he would take anything like that, and it interferes with his work sometimes.”
It was then that Ruth forgot her tiredness. She only ached for her own room at home where she could be alone for a while.
CHAPTER XI.
“Not unto the forest, O my lover,
O my lover, do not lead me to the forest.
Joy is where the temples are, lines of dancers swinging far,
Drums and lyres and viols in the town,
And the flapping leaves would blind me, and the clinging vines would bind me,
And the thorny rose-boughs tear my saffron gown.
I will love you by the light, and the beat of drums at night,
And the echoing of laughter in my ears,
But I fear the forest.”—Greek Folk Song.
It was Christmas Eve. A soft, light snow had left the country white and downy as a young swan’s breast. As if the feather padding of the road had muffled the engine, the car cut along quietly as a boat, but the clear, cooing tones of the girl’s voice carried far, and her laughter echoed back from the trees like the mimicry of some mischievous nymph. In the after calm of the year’s first snowstorm the purity of the earth and air and sky gave the world that touch of unreality dear to poets and lovers, and Marjorie and Billy had come out in the late afternoon, as they often did on holidays and Sundays, to breathe for miles the air of the hills, to watch the lights of the city rush out through the dusk like streams of little racing fires, and to drive
wherever fancy led them, stopping somewhere in town for supper and coming home slowly, very slowly and quietly in the dark.
“Let’s take some road we don’t know,” the girl suggested. “Let’s go over the hills, and then just when it’s getting dark we’ll come to the edge of the heights somewhere and coast right down into the city, like we did the first night you came here—do you remember?”
“Every second of it.”
“That was in the spring. Even the town was half asleep and lazy after the winter’s dissipation; to-night it will be as gay as a debutantes’ ball. In the country it was muddy and the fields and barns and fences stood out ugly and unashamed of themselves, like some old scrub-woman. Now the snow comes and gives her a new dress, you see, and here she is, a lady in white fox and diamonds. Wonderful, isn’t it, what clothes will do? But underneath she’s still the same old scrub-woman, the work-driven, squalid country. How I pity the people who have to stay here all their lives. Where are we going?”
Billy had turned up a new road, the winding, wooded avenue leading to the place on the hill. He had felt that if she could ever see its beauty it would be to-day, with the glow of the sun still pink above the cedars jagging the horizon, and the early moon making sharp shadows and glittering open spaces on the snow. Her last burst of