She gently laid her hand on his and drawing it away unsealed her lips. She was smiling radiantly, her dimple deep. And for a moment she enveloped him in a beaming look of affection and gratitude.
“There’s lots I want to say, but I suppose I must be obedient,” she murmured.
“Of course you must. Come, we ought to be going. Put your hat on or you’ll get all freckled.”
She went back to the spring and picked up her hat. As she pulled the elastic down over her cropped locks she said gaily:
“I feel so different from what I did when I came up—at least twenty years younger and fifty pounds lighter.”
“You’d better not forget how to accomplish that miracle,” said her companion. “Thirty years from now you’ll probably find it a great deal more to the point than you do to-day.”
They started down the path, laughing. The red eye of the sun, a flaming ball, stared at them between the trunks of the pines, and shot long pencils of flushed light into the rustling depths of the thickets. June led the way as before, but she was a different guide. She seemed as light-hearted going down as she had been oppressed coming up. The Colonel was to realize later how ready her optimism was to respond to the first glimmer of cheer, how quick and far was the swing of the pendulum.
Coming to a grassed plateau under the pines they paused for a moment’s rest. From the high crest of ground they could see the cottage with the cultivation of its garden cutting into the unfilled land, like an island of green floating in a yellow sea. It looked meaner and more insignificant than ever in the midst of the lazily out-flung landscape now swimming in a bath of colored light.
The Colonel saw in imagination a house he owned in San Francisco on Folsom Street. He had bought it as a favor from a pioneer friend whose fortunes were declining. It was the stateliest house of what was then a street of stately houses, with wide windows, vine-draped balconies, and scrolled iron gates shutting out the turmoil of the street. The thought had been in his mind when it came into his possession that it was the sort of house he would have given Alice, and the still more sacred thought had followed, that his children’s laughter might have echoed through its halls. Now he looked down on a hovel, also his property, where Alice had been glad to find a shelter, and in which her daughter had prayed that she might be left to die! Life and its mysteries! How inscrutable, how awful, it all was!
The voice of June at his side roused him.