Dull! She wanted to scream out her joy. She felt like racing to the big black team to throw her arms about their necks. Dull! There was no other spot in all the world so exalting as this small town and its over-peering peaks.
"Where is Mrs. Congdon?" she succeeded in asking at last.
"She has visitors and couldn't come," he answered. "But where's that 'mobile we've heard so much about?"
"Coming by fast freight."
"Freight! From all I've heard of your doings in Chicago I expected it to come as excess baggage."
It was cool, delicious green dusk—not dark—with a small sickle of moon in the west, and as they drove up the broad avenue towards home the town, the universe, was strangely sweet and satisfying. It seemed as though she had been gone an age—so much had come to her—so thick was the crowd of new experiences standing between her going and her return—so swiftly had her mind expanded in these months of vivid city life. "I'll never go away again," she said to Ben. "This country suits me."
"I'm glad to hear you say that," he answered, softly. In the most natural way he had put Congdon with Haney in the rear seat and had taken the place beside Bertha, and this nearness filled her with pleasure and an unwonted confusion. How big he was! and how splendid his clear, youthful profile seemed as it gleamed silver-white in the light of the big street-lamps. Never had his magnetic young body acted upon her so powerfully, so dangerously. His firm arm touching her own was at once a delight and a dread. She was all woman at last, awake, palpitant with love's full-flooding tide—bewildered, dizzy with rapture. Speech was difficult and her thought had neither sequence nor design.
Fordyce was under restraint also, and the burden of the talk fell upon Congdon, who proceeded in his amusingly hit-or-miss way to detail the important or humorous happenings, of the town, and so they rolled along up the wide avenue to the big stone steps before the looming, lamp-lit palace which they called home.
Ben sprang out first, glad of another opportunity to take Bertha's hand, a clasp that put the throbbing pain back in her bosom—filling her with a kind of fear of him as well as of herself—and without waiting for the Captain she ran up the walk towards the wide doorway where Miss Franklin stood in smiling welcome.
Her greeting over, the young wife danced about the hall, crying: "Oh, isn't it big and fine! And aren't you glad it's our own!" She appeared overborne by a returning sense of security and ownership, and ran from room to room with all the ecstasy and abandon of a child—but she stopped suddenly in the middle of her own chamber as if a remorseless hand were clutching at her heart. "But it is not mine!—I must give it all up!"