“Well,” said Mabella briskly, “I’m going round to help set the table.” Having seen Lanty, Mabella wished to get off alone to think over his perfections, which impressed her afresh each time she saw him.
“O! can’t you come for a little wander?” asked Sidney of Vashti. “There’s nothing to be done in the house; besides, that imp from the preacher’s is there, and I’m sure she is a host in herself.”
“Yes,” said Vashti, her voice more than usually vibrant. “Yes, I will come.”
She was very pale. She turned away as Jephthah’s daughter turned from the promise of her bridal bower. For, during these few minutes of idle speech amid the whirr of the threshing mill, Vashti Lansing had taken her final decision. She would marry Sidney Martin; but on her own terms, she added to herself. And then she went with him across the stubble, where the late rains had made a phantom spring of fresh green grass and over-eager weeds, which were putting forth their tender tops only to be a prey to the first sneering frost.
Ah, how futile and inconsequent it is to trace laboriously the windings of cause and effect; a touch often sends one over the precipice, and a smile, a sigh or a silence brings us face to face with Fate. Can we by searching find these things?
And Sidney, too, felt the fateful words trembling upon his lips, a keen envy of personal happiness possessed this man, who so rarely sought his own good. A great longing to stand as Lanty had stood, with the promise of life’s fulfilment at his side.
Sidney and the woman beside him walked across the stubble to where a little belt of scrubby oaks followed the course of a ditch between two fields; here and there a vivid red patch against the underwood showed a dogwood bush. Here and there an elm tree sprang up spire-like above the lower oaks.
“See,” said Sidney, “that row of elm trees. Can you not fancy that upon just some such day as this the seed was sown? Does it not give a delightful sense of the continuity and endurance of nature’s miracles to think that a gentle wind, such as now stirs their topmost leaves, chased the seed vessel playfully along the ground? The wind laughed then, thinking it was making fine sport of its little playfellow, but see, at every pause a seed was dropped, and like an egotistical king who marks the stages of his journey, the fragile cluster of seed has left its memento. You have seen the seed of the elm tree?”