“You must be getting moonstruck, Elma,” she said, “to be here and not light the lamps. Why, it is as dark as Egypt in this room, and you were always so prompt to light them.”
Elma bestirred herself to find the matches, and soon the swinging lamps were lit, and the store aglow.
Again the door was thrown open, and Elma’s uncle came in. He was Adam Hacker, namesake of the old-time landlord, and proprietor of the store. Mrs. Becker got her bread and departed, and Elma introduced Tatnall to the storekeeper. Soon she explained to him the stranger’s business, to which the uncle listened sympathetically. At the conclusion he said:
“It is really curious, after all these years, to have an Adam Hacker, an Elma Hacker and an Ammon Tatnall–almost Quicksall–here together; if Chansops was here it would be as if the past had risen again.”
“Let us hope there’ll be no Chansops this time,” said Tatnall. “Let us feel that everything that was unfulfilled and went wrong in those old days is to be righted now.”
It was a bold statement, but somehow it went unchallenged.
“I believe in destiny, the destiny of wayside cemeteries, of chance and opportunity,” he resumed. “It can be the only road to true happiness after all.”
“How happy we’d all be,” said Elma demurely, “if through all this we could only lay the ghost of my poor ancestress, the grey lady.”
“Nothing that is started is ever left unfinished,” answered Tatnall. “And we of this generation become unconscious actors in the final scenes of a drama that began a couple of centuries ago. In that way the cycle of existence is carried out harmoniously, else this world could not go on if it was merely a jumble of odds and ends, and starts without finishes; as it is, everything that is good, that is worthwhile, sometimes comes to a rounded out and completed fulfillment.”
The moon, which had come out clear, was three parts full, and shed a glowing radiance over the rugged landscape. After supper Ammon and Elma strolled out along the white, moon-bathed road. Coming to a cornfield the girl pointed to a great white oak with a plume-like crest which stood on a knoll, facing the valley, the river, and the hills beyond; they climbed the high rail fence, and slipping along quietly, seated themselves beneath the giant tree. Of the many chapters of human life and destiny enacted beneath the oak’s spreading branches, none was stranger than this one. There until the flaming orb had commenced to wane in the west, they sat, perfectly content. “Oh, how I like to rest on the earth,” said she. “How I love to be here, and look at your wonderful face,” he whispered, as he stroked the perfect lines of her nose, lips, chin and throat.