151XI
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
There came, with August, a perceptible shortening of the days. Cooler nights gave warning that the brief Canadian summer was nearing its end.
Pats labored on the raft, but the work was long. A float that would bear in safety two people down the river’s current–and possibly out to sea–demanded size and strength and weight. Felling trees, trimming logs, and steering them down the river to the “ship-yard,” proved a slower undertaking than had been foreseen. But nobody complained. The air they breathed and the life they led were in themselves annihilators of despair. It was an exhilarating, out-of-door life,–a life of love and labor and of ecstatic repose.
Both Elinor and Pats were up with the sun, and the days were never too long. To them it 152mattered little whether the evenings were long or short or cold or warm, for by the time the dishes were washed and the chores were done, they became too sleepy to be of interest to each other. And when the lady retired to her own chamber behind the tapestries, Pats, at his end of the cottage, always whistled gently or broke the silence in one way or another as a guarantee of distance, that she might feel a greater security.
As for lovers’ quarrels none occurred that were seriously respected by either party. In fact there was but little to break the monotony of that solid, absolute content with which all days began and ended.
“’Tis love that makes the world go round.”
There is no doubt of that, but two lovers, with unfailing appetites, however exalted their devotion, are sure, in time, to produce conspicuous results with any ordinary store of provisions. In the present instance the discovery–or realization–of this truth was accidental. It came one morning as Elinor, in a blue and white apron, with sleeves rolled up, was preparing corn-bread at the kitchen table–so they called the table near the fireplace at the end of 153the room. Pats came up from the cellar with a face of unusual seriousness.
“I have been an awful fool!”
She looked up with her sweetest smile: