“Two minutes and forty-eight seconds,” called Allison, putting away his stop watch with one hand and helping her with the other. He tucked her in more quickly than at the church, but with equal care, then he jumped in beside her, and never had he cut so swift and sure a circle with his sixty horse-power runabout.
They raced up and into the Park, and around the winding driveways with the light-hearted exhilaration of children, and if there was in them at that moment any trace of mature thought, they were neither one aware of it. They were glad that they were just living, and moving swiftly in the open air, glad that it was snowing, glad that the light was beginning to fade, that there were other vehicles in the Park, that the world was such a bright and happy place; and they were quite pleased, too, to be together.
It was still light, though the electric lamps were beginning to flare up through the thin snow veil, when they rounded a rocky drive, and came in view of a little lookout house perched on a hill.
“Oh!” called Gail, involuntarily putting her hand on his arm. “I want to go up there!”
The work of Edward E. Allison was well nigh perfection. He stopped the runabout exactly at the centre of the pathway, and was out and on Gail’s side of the car with the agility of a youngster after a robin’s egg. He helped her to alight, and would have helped her up the hill with great pleasure, but she was too nimble and too eager for that, and was in the lookout house several steps ahead of him.
“It’s glorious,” she said, and her low, melodious voice thrilled him again with that strange quality he had noticed when she had first spoken at the vestry meeting.
Below them lay a grey mist, dotted here and there with haloed lights, which receded in the distance into tiny yellow blurs, while the nearer lamps were swathed in swirling snowflakes. Nearby were ghosts of trees projecting their tops from the misty lake, and out of what seemed a vast eerie depth came the clang of street cars, and the rumble of the distant elevated, and the honks of auto horns, and all the rattle and roar of the great city, muffled and subdued.
“It’s like being out of the world.” He was astonished to find in himself the sudden growth of a poetic spirit, and his voice had in it the modulation which went with the sentiment.
“This was created,” mused Gail, as if answering an inner question. “Why should the clumsy minds of men destroy the simplicity of anything so vast, and good, and beautiful, as our instinctive belief in the Creator?”
Finding no answer in his experience to this unfathomable mystery, Edward E. Allison very wisely kept still and admired the scenery, which consisted of one girl framed tastefully in a miscellaneous assortment of snowflakes. When he tried to unravel the girl, he found her a still more fathomless mystery, and gave up the task in a hurry. After all, she was right there, and that was enough.