She smiled at him. It was as if storm clouds had broken and let the rays of the sun through. “Oh, Joe,” she cried, “it would be lovely if you came up. Old Rock seems to be a dreadfully lonesome place.”
“Old Rock lonesome!” he protested. “Not a bit of it, Virginia. There are lots of interesting things to do. We can take grand tramps.” In his enthusiasm for his home town, Joe forgot his game leg. “Some evening, I’ll take you down to the big granite bowlder, from which the town gets its name, on the shore of the pond. We can get on top of it and watch the moon come up over the tree covered hill on the other side until it makes a shimmering pathway across the water and turns the old white church on the hill into a castle of silver. I love to sit there and watch the lights of the village go out, one by one. It’s lovely then. The only sounds are the song of the crickets, the distant tinkle of a sheep bell, the splash of a leaping bass or maybe the hooting of an old owl. It is a beautiful place, Virginia, and with you there it would be wonderful.”
“‘I think that I shall love it,’ she said softly”
She listened to his words, her eyes big with interest, and a new happiness struggling in her heart. “I think that I shall love it,” she said softly, and, after a moment’s hesitation, “How long–how soon will you be able to come, Joe?”
An attendant approached to take the injured motorcyclist back to the ward.
Virginia hastily withdrew her hand from Joe’s grasp and immediately gave it back to him, when he cried, “Not good bye but until we meet in Old Rock.”
As she watched the attendant wheel the injured man away and turned to leave the hospital grounds, the girl was wonderfully cheered, and her mind accepted Joe Curtis’s picture of Old Rock by moonlight as conclusive evidence that this ancient village was not lonesome.