Lydia of the Pines

by Honoré Morrow

"The Indians knew no home, and so they died."—The Murmuring Pine.

If Amos was not happy after Lydia's concession, at least she never had seen him so interested in life as he was now. Nor had Kent ever been more considerate of Lydia. They went to a number of dances and skated together frequently in spite of the fact that Kent was very busy with his real estate work.

All this, Lydia told herself, should have made her happy, and yet, she was not. Even when Professor Willis took her to a Military hop and brought her home in a hack, she was conscious of the feverish sense of loss and uncertainty that had become a part of her daily living. Several times she had an almost overwhelming desire to tell him what she had done. But she could not bear to destroy the ideal she knew he had of her, even for the relief of receiving his sympathy, of which she was very sure.

Billy came to see her as usual, and took her to an occasional dance. But he was not the friend of old. And the change was not in any neglect of things done, it was in his way of looking at her; in his long silences when he studied her face with a grieved, puzzled look that made her frantic; in his ceasing to talk over his work with her with any air of comradeship, and most of all in his ceasing to bully her—that inalienable earmark of the attitude of the lover toward the beloved.

Lydia's nerves began to feel the strain before spring came in. She was pale in the morning and fever-flushed in the afternoon and her hands were uncertain. March was long and bleak, that year, but April came in as sweetly as a silver bugle call. The first week in April the ice went out of the lake with a crash and boom and mighty upheaval, leaving a pellucid calm of blue waters that brought a new light to Lydia's face. She heard the first robin call on her way home from college, the day that the ice went out.

She had walked up the road ahead of Billy, her black scholar's gown fluttering. Once, he would have run to overtake her, but now he plodded along a block behind, without a sound. Lydia did not pause at the cottage gate. The call of the robin was in her blood and she swung on up the road, past the Norton place, and into the woods.

Young April was there, with its silence a-tip-toe, and its warmth and chill. Lydia drew a deep breath and paused where through the trunks of the white birches she caught the glimmer of the lake. There was a log at hand and she sat down, threw her mortar-board on the ground and rested, chin cupped in her hands, lips parted, eyes tear dimmed. She was weary of thought. She only knew that the spiritual rightness with which she had sustained her mind and body through all the hard years of her youth, had gone wrong. She only knew that a loneliness of soul she could not seem to endure was robbing her of a youth that as yet she had scarcely tasted.

She sat without stirring. The blue of the lake began to turn orange. The robin's note grew fainter. Suddenly there was the sound of hasty footsteps through the dead leaves. Lydia looked up. Billy was striding toward her. She did not speak, nor did he. It seemed to her that she never had noticed before how mature Billy's face was in its new gauntness, nor how deep and direct was his gaze.

He strode up to the log, stooped, and drew Lydia to her feet. Then he lifted her, scholar's gown and all, in his arms and kissed her full on the lips, kissed her long and passionately, then looked deep into her eyes and held her to him until she could feel his heart beating full and quick.

For just a moment, Lydia did not stir, then she threw her arms around his neck, hid her face against his shoulder and clung to him with an intensity that made him tremble.