Finally the day before the one for sailing came, and with it the startling announcement from Oliver Gilbert that he was going to the city to see Poppea off.
"Land alive! you'll get lost; you don't know how the city's changed these near twenty years since the time you would fetch Poppy down to President Lincoln's obsequies!" cried Satira. "I've heard Miss Emmy say that what were cow pastures where she used to pick dandelions when a girl are built solid over with emporiums of fashion. Besides, you've never been aboard anything bigger'n Captain Secors's onion schooner, and if that big thing they're going on began to get up steam and snort, how it would quake your vitals. It did mine that trip I took."
That trip being the term applied to a wonderful excursion of the previous summer, from Bridgeton to the new-found land of pleasure, Coney Island, whither 'Lisha had taken her, and of which he was destined never to hear the last.
But Gilbert saying in a tone that barred discussion that he would take whatever risks there were, the matter was dropped as being decided.
Late in the scorching July afternoon he harnessed his old Roman-nosed horse to the chaise and disappeared on the cross-road that ran eastward toward the Moosatuck, without vouchsafing any explanation to his sister, who, having questioned him in vain, called his attention to the threatening array of 'thunder-heads' that were rolling over the hills, every few seconds being rent together by forks of lightning.
He had been gone perhaps half an hour when the storm reached the village, and great splashes of rain, falling upon the shed roof, were turned into steam by the heat of the tin.
Poppea, having given the finishing touches to her simple packing, was setting her room in order, fingering each article lovingly as though she felt that even should she come back and find all as she left it, yet there must be a difference.
As the rain increased to a steady downpour, she looked anxiously up the road and made a mental calculation as to what houses lay on the route Daddy had taken, and where he would be by now, his probable destination having been as obscure to her as to Satira.
Meanwhile, the horse and chaise were standing in the shelter of an abandoned lumber shack in the woods that overhung the west bank of Moosatuck, while Gilbert, utterly oblivious of the rain that gradually sifted to him through the heavy leafage, was following a narrow foot-path. Glancing from side to side, he pulled a long string of ground-pine here, there a fine branch of strong laurel, and then again a handful of the dark green, white-veined leaves of the wax-flowered pipsissewa; when his arms would hold no more and he again reached the chaise, the thunder-heads were scurrying across the bay and the rain was over.
Poppea had sorted the evening mail and was sitting at the desk in Gilbert's workshop when he came in, slowly yet without his cane, and crossing to where she was, laid his armful of dripping wood-treasure before her, saying, half-shamedfacedly, yet as to one who would understand:—