Tom Gordon, lately home from a full half-year spent in the unfettered solitudes of the Carriso iron fields, to be married first, and afterward to start up—with Caleb for superintendent—the idle Chiawassee plant as a test and experimental shop for American Aqueduct, was indemnifying himself for the long exile.
On this Saturday evening in the lovers' month of June he had walked Ardea around and about through the fragrant summer wood of the upper creek valley, retracing, in part, the footsteps of the boy whose fishing had been spoiled and the little girl who was to be bullied into submission; and so rambling they had come at length to the old moss-grown foot-log which had been a newly-felled tree in the former time. Tom went first across the rustic bridge, holding the hand of ecstatic thrillings, and pausing in mid-passage that he might have excuse for holding it the longer. Ah me! we were all young once; and some of us are still young,—God grant,—in heart if not in years.
It was during the mid-passage pause, and while she was looking down on the swirling waters sometime of terrifying, that Miss Dabney said:
"How deep is it, Tom? Would I really have drowned if you and Hector had not pulled me out?"
He laughed.
"It's a thankless thing to spoil an idyl, isn't it? But that is the way with all the little playtime heroics we leave behind in childhood. You could have waded out."
She made the adorable little grimace which was one of the survivals of the yesterdays, and suffered him to lead her across.
"And I have always believed that I owed my life to you—and Hector!" she said reproachfully.
"You owe me much more than that," he affirmed broadly, when they had sat down to rest—they had often to do this, lest the way should prove shorter than the happy afternoon—on the end of the bridge log.
"Money?"—flippantly.