O, the beautiful sky; O, the shine and shade of leaves! O, the splendor of young manhood! She fought down the dizziness which came to her. She smiled mechanically as they stood before her with frank, clean eyes and laughing lips, and so, slowly, brain reasserted itself over flesh, and she, too, grew frank and gay.
Then came the vacation. The partings, the bitter pain of leaving the young people she had learned to love, and, too, came the thought of home. The dear old coulé with its peaks and camel humps, and pappa John! He was waiting to see her there!
So the pain of leaving her mates was mingled with the joy of home-coming. She romped on the grass with the young lambs. She followed Pappa John about as of old, in the fields, while he wondered and marveled at her. She was so fine and white and lady-like.
She was fain to know all the news of the farm, and the neighborhood. She felt like kissing all the dear old ladies in the coulé. O, the old friends were the best after all! You could rest on them. They didn't care how you ate soup. They didn't keep you keyed up to company manners all the time.
She went back to her old dresses and cotton underwear, and went dirty as she liked, and got brown and iron-muscled again.
Carl met her on the road one day and bowed and drove on, with hurried action of the lines. He still bore her rejection of him fresh in mind. It is everlastingly to his credit, let it be said now, that he never made use of his youthful intimacy with her. He was a man, with all the honesty and sincerity and chivalry of a race of gentlemen in his head, slow-witted as he was.
CHAPTER XI
STUDY OF THE STARS
She came back each September with delight and exultation. It was not so much like going to the world's end now, and besides, her father seemed resigned to it. Back to the gleam of the lakes, the flaming sunsets, the moonlit nights filled with twang of guitars and floating harmony of fresh boyish voices, back to her girl-lovers and her books, back to the chalky odor of the recitation room.