She turned over on her pillow and closed her eyes, scarcely waiting for Robinette to leave the room.
“I’ve been allowed to do that, anyway,” Robinette said to herself, standing in the doorway to look back at the quiet sleeper, and then looking forward to a little boat nearing the shore. The cottage sheltered almost the only object that connected her with her past; the boat, she felt, held all her future.
The river, when Lavendar rowed himself across it, was very quiet. “The swelling of Jordan,” as Robinette called the rising tide, was over; now the glassy water reflected every leaf and twig from the trees that hung above its banks and dipped into it here and there.
Mooring his boat at the landing, Mark sauntered up to Mrs. Prettyman’s cottage, and having tapped lightly at the door to let 268 Mrs. Loring know of his arrival, as they had agreed he should do, he went along the flagged pathway into the garden, and sat down on the edge of the low wall that divided it from the river. Just in front of him was the little worn bench where he had first seen Robinette as she sat beside her old nurse with the tiny shoe on her lap. It was scarcely a fortnight ago; yet it seemed to him that he could hardly remember the kind of man he had been that afternoon; a new self, full of a new purpose, and at that moment of a new hope, had taken the place of the objectless being he had been before.
Everything was very still; there was scarcely a sound from the village or from the shipping farther down the river. Lavendar fancied he heard Robinette’s clear voice within the cottage; then he started suddenly and the blood rushed to his heart as he listened to her light steps coming along the paved footpath.
“Here you are!” she whispered. “Let us not speak too loud, for Nurse was just dropping 269 asleep when I left her. I’ve put a table-cover and a blanket over ‘Mrs. Mackenzie’ to keep her from quacking. Mrs. Prettyman has not been very well, poor dear, and is in bed. We’ve just talked about the lovely new home she’s going to have, and the transplanted plum tree; small, but warranted to bear in a year or two and give plums and jam like this one. I left her so happy!”
She stopped and looked up. “Oh! can any new tree be as beautiful as this one? Was ever anything in the world more exquisite? It has just come to its hour of perfection, Mr. Lavendar; it couldn’t last,––anything so lovely in a passing world.”
She sat down on the low wall, and looked up at the tree. It stood and shone there in its perfect hour. Another day, and the blossoms, too fully blown, would begin to drift upon the ground with every little shaking wind; now it was at its zenith, a miracle of such white beauty that it caused the heart to stop and consider. Bees and butterflies 270 hummed and flew around it; it cast a delicate shadow on the grass, and leaning across the wall it was imaged again in the river like a bride in her looking-glass.
Robinette sat gazing at the tree, and Lavendar sat gazing at her. At that moment he “feared his fate too much” to break the silence by any question that might shatter his hope, as the first breeze would break the picture that had taken shape in the glassy water beneath them.