Ranke, the servant informed them, was ready to meet the train.
“You're going... Elbe's affair on the Wingohocking?”
“Absolutely.” She stood illusive against the saffron blur of the candles, the sweeping hem of night.
“I'll remember,” he blundered; “whatever you would wish... you have changed everything. The dinner was—I don't remember what it was,” he confessed; “but I remember an olive.”
He left the automobile at the edge of Ellerton, and proceeded on foot, passing the dully-shinning bulk of the circus tent. He heard the brassy dissonance of the band within, the monotonous thud of horses' hoofs on the tanbark; a raucous voice rose at the entrance to the side-show dwelling unctuously on the monstrosities to be viewed within for the price of a dime, of a dime, a dime. He recalled the spent lioness in her painted cage, the haggard and sick hyena, the abject trot of the wolves to nowhere.—A sudden exhalation of hatred swept over him for the hideous inhumanity of circuses and men. Eliza had lifted him from the meaningless babble of trivial and hard voices into a high and immaculate region of shining space and quietude. He didn't want to come down again, he protested, to this.
XV
ANTHONY passed the few, intervening days to the excursion on the Wingohocking in a state of rapt absorption: his brain sounded with every tone of Eliza's voice; she smiled at him, in riding garb, over that delicate trail of freckles; he saw her in the misty, amber dress of the dance; in white, illusively lit by the candles against the shadowy veranda. Now, for the first time, day that had succeeded haphazard to day, without relation or plan, were strung together, bound into an intelligible whole, by the thread of romance. He must get a firm grip upon reality, construct a solid existence out of the unsubstantial elements of his living; but, in his new felicity, he was unable to direct his thoughts to details inevitably sordid; he was lost in the miracle of Eliza Dreen's mere presence; material considerations might, must, be deferred a short while longer.
A stainless afternoon sky overspread finally the group gathered about covered willow baskets on the green bank of the stream. Behind them the meadow swept level, turning back the flood of the sun with a blaze of aureate flowers, to a silver band of birch; the upstream reach, wrinkled and dark, was lost between tangles of wild grapes; below, with a smooth, virid rush, the water poured and broke over rocky shallows.