"Let us go there, my dear, and settle it now."
"Yes, Uncle Ranny," she murmured low.
"I've got to hand it to you, 'Licia," broke out Randolph, emerging from his silence. "You're a true sport—for a girl!" Whereat we all burst into happy laughter.
And for the rest of our peregrinations as well as in the train, the lad could not take his eyes from Alicia in sheer amazed admiration. It was as though he were seeing her for the first time.
CHAPTER XX
Had I time to speculate philosophically, I could expend much of it in wondering why pure joy cannot be recorded. Perhaps because we experience so little of it.
Of sorrow and tribulation we strange creatures that are men can give a pretty fair account. From Job down we have excelled in it. But before sheer joy we are dumb. I can only repeat to myself the poor colorless words that I am happy, happy, happy as the day is short.
For one brief space of reaction after finding Alicia, the senses reeled, the worn body and mind swooned into a sort of deliquescence of lassitude, the eyes smarted with unshed meaningless moisture, the overdriven heart throbbed with a vast supernal relief, coextensive with the universe. Then, swiftly, with an almost audible sound, that unnerved brain slid into its customary shape of health, more wholesomely joyous than ever before, and all the world was bathed in freshness.
The blue of the sky was fairer, the sunlight purer, and even the poor suburban grass of Crestlands autumnally waning, glistened with the verdure and brightness of a new creation. But who can describe happiness?
Pendleton is gone, Alicia—the children are here.