“I say—let’s fill the cart with hay.” And he began to cut grass for the purpose with his penknife.
But the keen, fine morning took on its last glory because she had passed that way, while he, like a clod, had been eating bacon, and he kissed the unpleasant red paint of the cart-wheel because her fingers must have touched it. For the springtime of life breeds such follies—or what men call follies afterwards for fear of regretting them too much.
At last the game of hay-cutting came to an end, and Jimmy tramped back on his sturdy little legs, dragging his cart behind him, and as Andy watched him go safely round the turn, he looked back and shouted—
“Better’n Tommy.”
For Jimmy was a Briton of the old type.
But Andy went in with his thoughts full of Elizabeth, and he felt as we all do when we are young on a prickly sunny morning, that he must get what he wanted because he wanted it so much.
All day long while he helped to decorate the little bare church and was gay with the young ladies who assisted, and attentive to Mrs. Thorpe who brought sheaves of corn and piles of flowers and fruit over which she presided like a jolly goddess of plenty in the porch, he was thinking about Elizabeth. When Mrs. Thorpe said, “Do try one of these pears, they are so sweet,” he replied with decorum, but his heart throbbed ridiculously, “Sweet—sweet—how sweet my lady is!”
And when Rose Werrit asked if she should decorate the pulpit, and was so pleased that old Bateson had given them the red apples after all, because they were so bright and pretty—he said, “Yes, indeed—how good of you,” but even made a sort of song in his head about that—though, really, Elizabeth’s worst enemy could never have called her ‘bright.’
Then Mrs. Dixon and the Webster girls arrived about six o’clock, and the whole household went in to service excepting Phyllis, who felt at the last moment that she could not stand the heated church and preferred a quiet walk instead.
The last of the sunset was dying behind the unstained windows as the rough, country voices sang the harvest hymn, but the lamplight fell pleasantly enough upon grain and fruit and flowers, and as Andy stood there, though he did not know it, he was leading his people back to the mystic beginning of all worship. He joined hands with Brother Gulielmus, who as plain Will Ford had sung a song at many a harvest home—and farther back still, with all those who had ever felt the joy of harvest. Rooted in immemorial needs—crowned with a hope that cannot die—belonging to all men and to all creeds—no wonder the hymn of that festival floated out across the sleeping fields with a poignant joy, a desperate hopefulness, that made old Bateson at his cottage door remark—