Now she understood everything; now her heart stood still and then throbbed with a wonderful joy. And she turned and threw her arms about his neck, crying softly: "Wayne! It is home!"
For the darkness which she had expected in the cavern's deep interior had fled before the softly brilliant light that bathed it rosily, that came from she did not yet know where. She saw a deep throated fireplace, built of big granite blocks, a monster log blazing and roaring mightily in it, the flames leaping up the rock chimney, drawn upward and back into the sloping passage where the draft of air had in the old days carried away the smoke from her rude stove. And she guessed who had made the fireplace, piling stone on stone.
She saw a table, rustic, heavy, with legs of twisted cedar branches, with books upon it, with a vase made of a hollowed out, gnarled limb and choked with its great armful of valley flowers. She saw a chair that patient, loving hands had made from what the winter-locked forest had provided, seat and back covered with deerskin cushions, a chair that opened its arms to her as though, still keeping its identity as a part of her woodland, it were welcoming her to a world where love's heart beat close to nature's. She saw that the hard floor had disappeared under freshly strewn pine needles and under the two big bear skin rugs which sprawled mightily before the table and before the fireplace. She saw another chair, Wayne's chair it was going to be, because it was such a monster.
She could only gasp as her dancing eyes tried to see everything at once—flowers everywhere, hiding the walls, breathing perfume from the corners, drooping from the ceiling.
"But the light!" she cried, wonderingly. "It is like day."
Then at last she saw how everywhere in the high ceiling he had chiselled out deep inverted bowls, and in each cup-like cavity nothing in the world other than a glowing electric bulb was shining, flooding the room with a soft glow.
"And you did all of this yourself? While you were alone here in the winter?"
His eyes were like hers, his own face flushed with the happiness of the hour.
"I didn't make the bulbs," he laughed. "It's taken me a week playing electrician to get the wires up, the dynamo running back there under the water fall. Do you like it?"
She did not answer. She had no time to answer, she was so busy trying the two chairs, inhaling the fragrance of the flowers, admiring the fireplace, examining the reading lamp which hung over the table and which he had constructed of wood, chosen for beauty of natural colour and grain, the opaque sides shutting out the light which fell straight down upon an open book.