Bring a brush, Amelia, and try to weave into my dull hair a little of the bright sunshine. Pin the red rose you gathered into my gown. Twine around your finger the damp tendrils which lie on my forehead, and make them curl as of old. Tell me a funny story of the Tompkinses to straighten up the droop of my mouth. For Dimbie is coming down the lane—I hear his footstep eager and fast—and I want to look like the Marguerite he married.
A bird has broken into song in the apple tree—a golden melody. Is he singing for the coming of Dimbie? Or is he a harbinger of hope? Does he mean that Dimbie's love will stand—last throughout the ages? Oh, that it might be so! I would rather be a cripple with Dimbie's love than whole and strong without it.
CHAPTER XVIII
DIMBIE ROLLS A GREAT LOAD FROM MY HEART
In the crises of life—the tremendous moments of fear, hope, and expectation—what a curious calmness overtakes us. Maud's poor lover, after killing her brother in the duel, says—
"Why am I sitting here so stunn'd and still,
Plucking the harmless wild-flower on the hill?"
And later on, when he sits on the Breton strand, he says—
"Strange that the mind when fraught
With a passion so intense
One would think that it well
Might drown all life in the eye,—
That it should, by being so over-wrought,
Suddenly strike on a sharper sense
For a shell, or a flower, little things
Which else would have been passed by."
And so it was with me, I "suddenly struck on a sharper sense" as Dimbie came through the gate, and I had nothing to say in the first moment of greeting but to tell him that a button was missing from one of his boots and his coat was very dusty.