It was a glorious morning. The sun had ripped away the mists that, in the mountains, always hang damp and veillike between gray dawning and colorful day. The cool forest recesses were vocal with the twitterings and song from feathered throats.
Spurrier sat down by the road and gave himself up to thoughts that it was safer to banish: thoughts that came with those sights and sounds and that made long-stilled pulses awaken and throb in him.
This morning made him feel Glory’s presence and gave him a fine recklessness as to responsibility and consequence. Suddenly he came to himself and seemed to hear the cool cynicism of Martin Harrison’s voice inquiring, as it had once actually inquired: “Growing sentimental?”
He pulled himself together and stiffened his expression into one more suitable upon the face of a man who has taken the severe vows of service to a cold ambition.
But a little later he heard a sound and looked up sidewise to see Glory herself standing near him in the road; a materialization of the truant dreams he had been entertaining.
She wore a dress whose simplicity accentuated the 151 slender erectness of her young body and the litheness of her carriage. Her hair hung in braids and the sunbonnet had fallen back from the brightness of her hair. In her eyes played the violet lights of a merriment that lifted and curved her lips beguilingly.
Spurrier came to his feet, and perhaps Glory, who had succumbed to her moment of self-revelation there on the twilight porch, had her revenge now. For that first startled moment as their glances met, the eyes that looked into hers were lover’s eyes, and their unspoken message was courtship. If he maintained the stoic’s silence forever, as to words, at least his heart had spoken.
“Before Heaven,” said the man slowly, and the tremor of his voice was out of keeping with the ingrained poise of his usual self-command, “when they called you Glory, they didn’t misname you!”
The girl flushed pink, and he took a step toward her with the absorbed intensity of a sleep-walker.
Glory stood there—watched him coming and did not move. To her, though she had sought to hide it, he had become the One Man. Her unconfessed love had magnified and deified him—and now his own eyes were blazing responsively with love for her!