It was a good season. The days were bright, the nights brought plentiful showers, everything throve at the fruit farm, and at midsummer Ezra Tolford found that he had outdone his best expectations.
Other things prospered besides the products of the soil. Andrea was her plump, rosy self again, radiant with happiness and energy. The life she led was that for which she was born, the life that countless generations of her kindred had lived before her. She loved the daily round of labour, loved to cook, to keep the house neat. She loved the breath of the rich earth, when the plough rent the furrows. She loved the simple gossip of the neighbours, who ran in to consult with bated breath the wearing possibilities of a dress pattern or a new stitch in knitting. She had no doubts or fears, but was contented.
When she first met Gurth, his world seemed so far from hers, so much above and apart, that she listened to all he said with silent acquiescence, yielding always to his judgment, and never presuming to discuss matters of which she could have no knowledge, all the while adoring him with the idealizing passion of first love.
Now this was changed; he was no longer a knight from dreamland, but a fellow-worker, with whom she might discuss plans into which she had a far more practical insight than he. She loved him as devotedly, but on a rational plane.
As for Gurth, did he like this reversal? He was often worried by his own state of mind. Physically he was well, and, though rather thin, his face wore a healthy sun bronze. All his plans were going forward smoothly, the Hill Farm was nearly ready for its autumn planting of small fruits, and there would be money enough left over to bridge the way for the little household, until the soil yielded its crops,—yet he was not wholly contented.
Andrea’s complete satisfaction and identification with her work seemed a reproach to him. Was this vigorous woman the same being as the girl who a year before stood blushing and silent, or else was moved to tears when he read aloud or played his violin to her? She seemed no longer to need protection, but rather to protect him.
His violin, could he have dreamed that he should ever become estranged from it? As his fingers grew stiff from contact with the soil, they stumbled over the strings insensibly, and the vibrating instrument seemed to grow shrill and wail in grief at the rough touch.
Then he would try again and play something more simple with a legato movement, when, perhaps, Andrea would frankly say, “What ails your violin, dearest? It seems out of tune, you do not play it as you used.” Then he would put it by.
As for books, there was no time for them, no time for study and dreams. During the early spring he had read almost nightly to Margaret, and often Ezra Tolford joined in the talk that followed. Now Andrea nodded laughingly if he merely suggested reading, and asked him if he supposed she could keep awake to hear him, when she must churn to-morrow. As he rose to go, perhaps, to his attic for a quiet hour, she would twine her arms around his neck and tell him it was not good to spoil his eyes with books on summer nights, and so the days went by.
Gradually it seemed to him that Margaret was the one link that held before him what he used to be. She said but very little to him usually, but went on with her daily life, keeping herself as ever refined and self-contained. It was through her only now that Waldsen knew that the world still rolled on. It was from her conversation that he gained scraps from books, magazines, and even the daily news, as she talked to interest Andrea as they worked and chatted together. In music, too, it was the same. With exquisite tact she would choose some song that Andrea knew and could sing correctly and ask Gurth to accompany them.