He saw only the parched grass quivering between them, and about their feet a silly multitude of grasshoppers snapping upward with thin, dry clicks, to sail in short curves deflected by the wind. In some former silence it had been so; but where he could not tell, nor could he raise his head out of this present shame. Far more visible before him lay his broken purpose, stripped of all disguise and easy palliation.
“Do you see why?” said Anna once more, and when he still made no answer, suddenly clapped her hands like a child. “I’ve made him mad, I’ve made him mad!” she chanted. “Now he’ll fight like a trooper!”
She laughed, a queer, short, hurried laugh, and went on breathlessly.
“We say good-by here because it’s the best place. And you don’t remember it! And I do, and always did and always will, and I told you a dreadful fib in the boat, for the morning was just like this, and the grasshoppers just the same, and you had the thorn in your cheek, right exactly—there!”
Her volley of words was swift, her movement swifter. The breath was still warm on his cheek as he reached out with a cry. But once more she was bounding up the path, light as the wind in her hair. He heard her laughing as she ran, plunged a few steps after, but halted as he saw her, without a glance behind, overtake the plodding figure of Habakkuk. It was ended, she was right.
The two moved slowly over the crest, sank to their shoulders in the shimmering grasses of the sky-line. For a time the black cap of the one, the bright head of the other, went bobbing and dwindling against the whiteness of a cloud. Then these also blurred into the rim, and sank. A wind—the first wind of early autumn—followed them over the hill, whitening the grass in little scallops and waves, in puffs and whirls, and sudden scurrying lines, like the breath of a colorless flame, passing incessantly upward.
He stood watching, alone with the wind and the cloud. When at last he gave over, and wheeled about, the whole valley was darkened and vacated. He did not see it, or the house, or the river, for in this opposite direction lay only something unpalatable, necessary, with a short name that was no less trite than wonderful. Toward that he went downhill resolutely, eager to begin, anxious, exulting, like a man who has set his face toward the wars.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
U · S · A