The birds, after a dawning chorus of vehement, almost theatric joy, made their first short flights from cover to cover among the elms. The rim of eastern hills had grown incandescent, till like a coal of fire snapping a tight cord, the sun burned through the horizon, and drove thin vapors slowly across the river. They rolled back, parting for a phantom Exodus. The breath of the sea mingled sharply with cool fresh-water smells alongshore, and in the fields with the fairy spice of dying strawberry leaves. It was that bright weather which comes once in a man’s life; and Miles, his boots soaked in dew, spattered to the knee with white and yellow petals, came wading home through tall grass.
Ella was rattling about her stove, alone in the kitchen.
“Don’t track that gurry in here,” she commanded, glancing sourly.
“What’s the odds,” he laughed, “a morning like this? It’s all clean.”
She turned on him sharply, but in the same instant checking her reply, gave him a suspicious, discountenancing stare.
“Leapin’ the fields, hey?” She slammed the iron door with something like a grunt.
Miles sat down on the doorstep, as if to clean his boots, but in reality to give his thoughts a breathing-space, survey the new kingdoms which they had coursed, and take the height and depth of their discovery. Not over the hills, or past the dazzling limit of the bay, but here in these four walls lived his happiness. The old plans, long disregarded and summer-fallow, now lay entirely barren. He had meant to go away, to run about in the world, and for no purpose, except to seek in new combinations what he might all the time have left buried here. Here in this house the past grief, the present transport, alike had found their man. And what greed could harry more out of life? Nowhere else, here; in wonder he turned to look indoors upon that homely and amazing theatre.
Instead, he saw Ella standing over him in the doorway. The strangeness of her look at once laid hold of him; for the round, freckled face was no longer whimsical, but sad, earnest, even a little pale.
She was the first to speak.
“Don’t you be mad,” she began. “Don’t be mad with me, will ye, for what I’m goin’ to say?”