“I can imagine the horror some of them would
feel at the prospect of pioneering in the country, but I know that things out here can be made as safe and comfortable and I hope far more worth while than they can be in any city, if people just have the right material in themselves. We would have less money, but less would be required for the same kind of life. Think what it could be! This place will be mine then, the old house and the trees and all. We could have a bungalow to delight the heart of any architect, and we have ground enough to make a natural park around it. We could have a blazing fireplace as big as a cave with logs from our own woods, and we could make it a centre for other less happy people who needed the warmth of a real home sometimes. We would have our own horses to galavant all over the country, but, best of all, we would always have the cabin to come home to, and time to be alone, to think and talk and learn to know each other. People can’t do that where they live in crowds.”
Then a quick, troubled look shot over his face. “I had forgotten,” he apologized awkwardly, “but there’s so little time, and I get so carried away with the idea of having you here, that anything else seems impossible; so I blunder into a visioning like this.”
Three years ago she could run her hand through his crumpled hair as she would with a little boy in trouble. She couldn’t do that now.
Anyway, she reasoned, it was very different comforting a man for his mother who had died, and for a sweetheart who was flippantly alive and breaking his heart from a distance. She couldn’t even look at him. But the old instinct was still there, maternal, protective. She seemed to take on new height with it, and her eyes laughed with a comradely tenderness near akin to tears.
“The whole trouble is you’re lonesome, Billy, and it’s leading you into dangerous places,” she said. “You’ve set your heart so on living here that you think just the place would make everything right. Don’t go away thinking you’re losing anything. The place will be here just the same when you come back, and I’ll be here. We can come out as often as you like and have no end of good times—but don’t you see, Billy, there are some places where you just can’t compromise?”
He reddened painfully.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I know you would if you could, just like you’ve always done everything else I wanted. But you can’t, and I don’t wonder.... We came out here for a holiday. The woods are all dappled green and sunshine—pine needles under your feet deep as a Donegal carpet. There’s a trail winding around for about a mile up to a spring in the rocks. People say the Indians made it, but I think it was some wise old cow finding the easiest slopes
on her way up for a drink. It’s like a view from an aeroplane to look down when you get to the top. Shall we go?”
They were not more foolish or more misunderstood than generations of lovers had been before them.