But I sat silent. My heart—it would not take such a make-believe tribute.
I rose from our seat. "Good night, Eloise, I wish now that I had stayed in Germany," I said as I walked in.
"Jack, come back, don't be angry with me. I've done the best I could."
I saw her turn defiantly, like one who, receiving a hurt, fights back. I left her sitting under the trees.
CHAPTER VII
THE CHIMES OF THE WISTERIA
I was up and out the next morning before Aunt Lucretia or any of the servants. I wanted to get to the dairy in time to see Tammas milk. I longed to see his whitewashed cottage and the clean, stone dairy under the hill, near the spring.
I walked through the lot where the Jersey herd had lain the night before, leaving shimmering shapes of themselves impressed in the hollow mold of blue grass, crushed and shining for lack of dew. Nearby was the brood-mare paddock, sloping downward to the meadow. Beyond, the tree-covered hills.
It was a perfect picture; the sun flushing the green of the hills, the air damp and tainted with the earth-odor of early day. But I had not beaten Tammas nor Marget, his good wife; nobody ever beat them up, not even the cows. He was calling them to the barn in the same way as of old, in the voice that I had heard ever since I could remember. He stood squarely in the barn door, blocky and bowed of legs, his broad Scotch face split wide across with a big, kindly mouth from which came, like the deep tones of a cathedral's bell down the valley: "Coom, lassies—coom, noo!"
Like children called into supper they obeyed; silver grays, fawns, chocolates, red-fawns and pied, crumpled of horns and slim of tail, marching solemnly down. One, a three-year old heifer, with her first calf, answered him like a school girl, whirling half around in awkward romp and elephantine effort to kick up her stiff heels even as she had seen the standard-bred filly do!