At her home-coming for the summer she brought to an end the meals in the kitchen; but when she left once more for Stanwick and school Ettie and Calvin without remark drifted back to the comfortable convenience of the table near the cooking stove.
This period of Lucy's experience at an end she arrived in Greenstream on a hot still June evening. Neither Calvin nor his sister had been able to go to Stanwick for the school commencement, and Calvin had been too late to meet the stage. After the refreshing cold water in the bright tin basin by the kitchen door he went to his room for a presentable necktie and handkerchief—Lucy was very severe about the latter—and then walked into the dining room.
The lamp was not yet lit, the light was elusive, tender, and his heart contracted violently at the youthful yet mature back toward him. She turned slowly, a hand resting on the table, and Calvin Stammark's senses swam. An inner confusion invaded him, pierced by a sharp unutterable longing.
“Hannah,” he whispered.
She smiled and advanced; but, his heart pounding, Calvin retreated. He must say something reasonable, tell her that they were glad to have her back—mustn't leave them again. She kissed him, and, his eyes shut, the touch of her lips re-created about him the parlor of the Braleys,—the stiffly arranged furniture with its gay plush, the varnished fretwork of the organ, the pink glow of the lamp.
She was Hannah! The resemblance was so perfect—her cheek's turn, her voice, sweet with a trace of petulance, her fingers—that it was sustained in a flooding illumination through the commonplace revealing act of supper. It was as if the eighteen years since Hannah, his Hannah, was a reality were but momentary, the passage of the valley. His love for her was unchanged—no, here at least, was a difference; it was greater, keener; exactly as if during the progress of their intimacy he had been obliged to go away from her for a while.
She accompanied Ettie to the kitchen and Calvin sat on the porch in a gathering darkness throbbing with frogs and perfumed with drifting locust blooms. Constellation by constellation the stars glimmered into being. Hannah, Lucy! They mingled and in his fiber were forever one. He gave himself up to the beauty of his passion, purified and intense from long patience and wanting, amazed at the miracle that had brought back everything infinitely desirable.
He forgot his age, and, preparing for the night, saw with a sense of personal outrage his seamed countenance reflected in the mirror of the bureau. Yet in reality he wasn't old—forty-something—still, not fifty. He was as hard and nearly as springy as a hickory sapling. There was a saying in which he found vast comfort—the prime, the very prime of life.
VIII
His enormous difficulty would be to bring Lucy to the understanding of his new—but it was the old—attitude toward her. If she had never become completely familiar to him association had made him a solid recognized part of her existence; if not exactly a father, an uncle at the very least. Calvin realized that she would be profoundly shocked by any abrupt revelation of his feeling. Yet he was for the time in no hurry to bring about the desired change in their relationship. His life had been so long empty that it was enough to dwell on the great happiness of his repossession.