Margaret's nice sense of color and correct eye had hastened this result. She could grasp at the first glance the masses of light and shade, giving each its proper value in the composition. She and Oliver. really studied out their compositions together before either one set a palette, a most desirable practice, by the way, not only for tyros, but for Academicians.
This relying upon Margaret's judgment had become a habit with Oliver. He not only consulted her about his canvases, but about everything else that concerned him. He had never formulated in his mind what this kind of companionship meant to him (we never do when we are in the midst of it), nor had he ever considered what would become of him when the summer was over, and the dream would end, and they each would return to the customary dulness of life; a life where there would be no blue ether nor clouds, nor vanishing points, nor values, nor tones, nor anything else that had made their heaven of a summer so happy.
They had both lived in this paradise for weeks without once bringing themselves to believe it could ever end (why do not such episodes last forever?) when Oliver awoke one morning to the fact that the fatal day of their separation would be upon him in a week's time or less. Margaret, with her more practical mind, had seen farther ahead than Oliver, and her laugh, in consequence, had been less spontaneous of late, and her interest in her work and in Oliver's less intense. She was overpowered by another sensation; she had been thinking of the day, now so near, when the old stage would drive up to Mrs. Taft's pasture-gate, and her small trunk and trap would be carried down on Hank's back and tumbled in, and she would go back alone to duty and the prosaic life of a New England village.
Neither of them supposed that it was anything else but the grief of parting that afflicted them, until there came a memorable autumn night—a night that sometimes comes to the blessed!—when the moon swam in the wide sky, breasting the soft white clouds, and when Oliver and Margaret sat together on the porch of Mrs. Taft's cottage—he on the steps at her feet, she leaning against the railing, the moonlight full upon her face.
They had been there since sunset. They had known all day what was in each other's mind, but they had avoided discussing it. Now they must face it.
"You go to-morrow, Madge?" Oliver asked. He knew she did. He spoke as if announcing a fact.
"Yes."
The shrill cry of a loon, like the cry of a child in pain, sifted down the ravine from the lake above and died away among the pines soughing in the night-wind. Oliver paused for a moment to listen, and went on:
"I don't want you to go. I don't know what I am going to do without you, Madge," he said with a long indrawn sigh.
"You are coming to us at Brookfield, you know, on your way back to New York. That is some thing." She glanced at him with a slightly anxious look in her eyes, as if waiting for his answer to reassure her.