The Mayor of Warwick

by Herbert M. Hopkins

A moment later he regretted his ill-considered words, for at the thought of the peril she might have been in, she rose to her feet with an evident return of her panic. Without waiting to put on her gloves, she thrust them into his hands with an impulsive movement, almost childlike in its unconscious betrayal of emotion. He put the gloves in his pocket and took her hand to lead her down the slope. "It's slippery here," he explained. But there was no need to apologize for what she by no means considered a liberty. Indeed, though he was conscious of nothing so much as of her hand in his, he was aware that she felt in his own merely a needed support. As she leaned upon him in the descent, he divined that her fear increased, instead of diminishing, with their progress into the circumjacent darkness, as if the act of flight intensified an appreciation of the original cause. He strove to dispel the emotion his own words had done so much to arouse, not without a guilty self-congratulation that his thoughtlessness had driven her to his protection. Feeling his way thus, step by step, he presently saw before his feet, as in a dream, the dim reflection of a star; and then the stream grew upon his vision, like a strip of fallen sky.

At that moment her foot slipped on the smooth pine needles, and with a smothered cry she seemed almost to swoon into his arms at the very margin of the water. Instinctively he held her close, her heart beating wildly against his own. A fragrance sweeter than the fragrance of the woods pervaded his senses, and he felt her hair brush against his cheek. Then she stood released, having recovered herself with a swift impulse, like a wild creature that had felt in time the first touch of the snare. This elusiveness, this sudden recoil from his contact, sobered him. What he might have done, had she remained a moment longer in his arms, must be forever a matter of conjecture with him now; but the intoxication vanished like a vapor from his mind, leaving a keen vision of the situation in its uncoloured reality. There arose within him a certain sense of shame that he had given so much and received, as yet, nothing in kind. He had passed that period of youth when a stolen kiss seems the acme of love's adventure. Such a theft on his part, irrespective of its consequences, would have left him still unsatisfied.

The belt of sky above the stream was sown thick with stars, that were beginning to make themselves felt more clearly each moment as the turning world gradually plunged this part of its surface into deeper shadow. In this wan light the pathway lay dimly discernible before them. The condition of the atmosphere was such as is best described by the word sublustris, that glimmering radiance which lies somewhere between thick darkness and such a light as is thrown by the crescent moon. It was no longer necessary that he should guide her as before, and as soon as she had freed herself from his embrace, she began to take the lead.

"What a coward you must think me!" she said, with a ghostly little laugh. "Even now I would n't dare go last. As it is, I can see ahead and know that you are behind me."

Her confidence in his protecting power brought him scant consolation. A spirit of dreariness seemed to rise up from the faint reflections that floated on the stagnant water; it blew stealthily out of the encroaching woods, and was voiced in the stuttering, tentative note of an awakened owl. Familiarity with nature had freed him from that sense of pursuit in the woods at night which oppresses even a stout heart unaccustomed to loneliness, and the flight of the unexpected apparition was sufficient proof that he had no desire to molest them. The incident certainly offered no ground for continued uneasiness, he reflected. Why, then, did she make so much of it? Why indeed, except that her companion was not the one man in all the world with whom she would choose to be there alone. The time and the place were full of romantic suggestions, were the loved one present. That he was not present was indicated only too clearly by the unconscious confession of her next remark: "I would n't have believed two hours ago that this path could seem so long!"

They reached the boat-house at last, but instead of turning up the ravine which he had followed from the spring, she ascended a flight of stairs and came out upon an open road. From this point their way was straight and plain. On their right lay the woods from which they had emerged, and on their left was an unobstructed field. In this free space the heavens seemed to expand immeasurably, and both felt the influence of the change. She began to make light of her former alarm, and his mood became more hopeful. He told himself that he had nourished impossible expectations, considering their short acquaintance, and that the remnant of their time together could be better employed than by indulging alone his wounded pride. As they walked up and down the platform, waiting for the car, the frogs from a near-by pool trilled intermittently, and they paused to listen.

"They seem to be congratulating themselves upon the prolongation of the summer season," he remarked. "Miss Wycliffe, have you any peculiar associations with that sound?"

"Dinners," she returned flippantly. "Heavens! I've had enough of nature for one evening. How perfectly melancholy! But what do they remind you of?"

"I 'm in a reminiscent mood," he confessed. "I can never hear the frogs trilling in the night without being reminded of the marshlands around my native town in the Middle West. Every night, all summer long, I could hear that symphony through the open windows of my room, and because I was then in the adventurous and romantic period of youth, the recurrence of the sound brings back an echo of old emotions. I feel as if I were being called upon to go out into the world and seek my fortune."

"Have you been back there lately?" she asked. "How does it seem to revisit the home of your childhood after having had adventures, and after having done something in the world? I 've never had any home but this, I 've never travelled except for pleasure, and I 've never accomplished anything."