"See here! Isn't it pretty late for a pair of rheumatic old folks to be out sailing? It's 9:30 o'clock."
"The breeze failed us," Isabel answered, as Mason took her hand to help her ashore.
"And the night was so beautiful," said Mason. Before she loosed his hand Isabel shook it hard and now Mason understood. He mailed the letter that night, and Rose held his future in her hand.
CHAPTER XXV
ROSE RECEIVES A LETTER
Rose went directly from that storm to the repose and apparent peace of the country, and it helped her to make a great discovery. She found every familiar thing had taken on a peculiar value—a literary and artistic value. It was all so reposeful, so secure. A red barn set against a gray-green wooded hillside was no longer commonplace. "How pretty!" she thought; "I never noticed that before."
A little girl wrapped in a shawl was watching cattle in the field; a dog sat near, his back to the misty drizzle. Rose saw it and put herself in the place of that child, chilled and blue of hand, with unfallen tears upon her cheeks.
A crow flying by with ringing, rough cry made her blood leap. Some cattle streamed up a lane and over a hill; their legs moving invisibly gave them a gliding motion like a vast centipede. Some mysterious charm seemed imparted to everything she saw, and, as the familiar lines of the hills began to loom against the sky, she became intolerably eager to see her father and the farm. She hoped it would be a sunny day, but it was raining heavily when she got out at the station.
He was there, the dear, sweet, old face smiling, almost tearful. He had an umbrella and couldn't return her hug; but he put his arm about her and hurried her to the carriage, and in a few moments they were spattering up the familiar road.