"I shall never be as wise as you, Uncle Ranny," she laughed softly, lingering in my arms. "There! I have called you Uncle Ranny again. I am afraid—oh, so afraid, I shall always call you that!"
I sealed her lips.
"Oh, if that is all you're afraid of," I murmured in the tone of devout thanksgiving, "if that is all—let us go in, my own."
And now Alicia is waiting to meet the dawn with me.
Up, up, heart of my heart, star of my life, happiness, nearer to me than my own soul, fire-bringer, life-bringer—up, or I shall deify you in my mad folly. Up, up, my Alicia—for the dawn is breaking!
EPILOGUE
I have been sitting in the shade of a trellis watching the miraculously mobile suspension of a humming bird over a cluster of honeysuckle blooms. That humming bird, whorl of triumphant aspiration that it is—aspiration of insect to become bird—seems in a manner to embody my life story.
For the humming bird the Golden Age is this perfect summer day, with its tendril and leaf, its beds of bleeding heart and bridal wreath, sweet William, larkspur and marigold and the heavy fragrant breath of honeysuckle. And so it is for me, also. No fable is deadlier to the human race, to human weal and human hope, than that same fable of the Golden Age. There never was an age one half so golden as the now, nor the infinitesimalest part so golden as the ages that await us. My son there, sleeping in his hammock under the tree, overhung by fine netting, Randolph Byrd, the younger, will see a more wondrous human life than any we have yet beheld.
Two years and more have passed since I have opened this record of yours, Randolph the Aged, and I open it now with a purpose, for a special and peculiar reason.
Alicia has chanced to see it and she fell upon it with a strange—to me inexplicable—delight. She desires me to "round it off", as she puts it, to disguise it a trifle here and there as to names and places, and to publish it for the edification of mankind! If only we could appear to the world in the stature loving eyes see us! But laugh as I will at Alicia, she persists obstinately in her wish.