She rested her hand fondly on his arm, and he took it into his own.
One evening the pair were out for that sunset walk which their young blood so relished, and which often led them, as it did this time, across the wide, open commons behind the town, where the unsettled streets were turf-grown, and toppling wooden lamp-posts threatened to fall into the wide, cattle-trodden ditches.
“Fall is coming,” said Mary.
“Let it come!” exclaimed John; “it’s hung back long enough.”
He looked about with pleasure. On every hand the advancing season was giving promise of heightened activity. The dark, plumy foliage of the china trees was getting a golden edge. The burnished green of the great magnolias was spotted brilliantly with hundreds of bursting cones, red with their pendent seeds. Here and there, as the sauntering pair came again into the region of brick sidewalks, a falling cone would now and then scatter its polished coral over the pavement, to be gathered by little girls for necklaces, or bruised under foot, staining the walk with its fragrant oil. The ligustrums bent low under the dragging weight of their small clustered berries. The oranges were turning. In the wet, choked ditches along the interruptions of pavement, where John followed Mary on narrow plank footways, bloomed thousands of little unrenowned asteroid flowers, blue and yellow, and the small, pink spikes of the water pepper. It wasn’t the fashionable habit in those days, but Mary had John gather big bunches of this pretty floral mob, and filled her room with them—not Mrs. Riley’s parlor—whoop, no! Weeds? Not if Mrs. Riley knew herself.
So ran time apace. The morning skies were gray monotones, and the evening gorgeous reds. The birds had finished their summer singing. Sometimes the alert chirp of the cardinal suddenly smote the ear from some neighboring tree; but he would pass, a flash of crimson, from one garden to the next, and with another chirp or two be gone for days. The nervy, unmusical waking cry of the mocking-bird was often the first daybreak sound. At times a myriad downy seed floated everywhere, now softly upward, now gently downward, and the mellow rays of sunset turned it into a warm, golden snow-fall. By night a soft glow from distant burning prairies showed the hunters were afield; the call of unseen wild fowl was heard overhead, and—finer to the waiting poor man’s ear than all other sounds—came at regular intervals, now from this quarter and now from that, the heavy, rushing blast of the cotton compress, telling that the flood tide of commerce was setting in.
Narcisse surprised the Richlings one evening with a call. They tried very hard to be reserved, but they were too young for that task to be easy. The Creole had evidently come with his mind made up to take unresentfully and override all the unfriendliness they might choose to show. His conversation never ceased, but flitted from subject to subject with the swift waywardness of a humming-bird. It was remarked by Mary, leaning back in one end of Mrs. Riley’s little sofa, that “summer dresses were disappearing, but that the girls looked just as sweet in their darker colors as they had appeared in midsummer white. Had Narcisse noticed? Probably he didn’t care for”—
“Ho! I notiz them an’ they notiz me! An’ thass one thing I ’ave notiz about young ladies: they ah juz like those bird’; in summeh lookin’ cool, in winteh waum. I ’ave notiz that. An’ I’ve notiz anotheh thing which make them juz like those bird’. They halways know if a man is lookin’, an’ they halways make like they don’t see ’im! I would like to ’ite an i’ony about that—a lill i’ony—in the he’oic measuh. You like that he’oic measuh, Mizzez Witchlin’?”
As he rose to go he rolled a cigarette, and folded the end in with the long nail of his little finger.
“Mizzez Witchlin’, if you will allow me to light my ciga’ette fum yo’ lamp—I can’t use my sun-glass at night, because the sun is nod theh. But, the sun shining, I use it. I ’ave adop’ that method since lately.”