“What do you mean to do if you stay here? How can you keep house?”
“Turn the farm largely to fruit, and with helpers enlarge the wagon shop; in spite of cheap Western makers, there is a good demand for hand-made work wagons. As to the house, Aunt Louisa Taylor will care for it, and between us, God willing, we will make the Boy into a man and let him go to college for me. Do you know, Eileen, that a good many of the world’s best soldiers have gone to the fight as substitutes for those who could not, and the work was better done than it would have been by those who grieved because they could not go?”
“Have you lost all your ambition, Ernest? Can you be content with such an empty life? If any tongue but yours had told me of this absurd sacrifice, I would not have believed it.”
“Not all my ambition; I still have my books, and I can buy others. I have my rod and my gun, and all outdoors, besides the Boy, and—memories of what, until to-day, I thought might be. I believed that you cared for me, Eileen, that you liked our old hills and their life; I thought that you, too, loved the bird on the wing and the sound of the wind in the grass. I knew that you would go away to travel for a long while, perhaps, but I thought you would want to return.”
“I do care, Ernest, that is, in a way; but there must be something else to do in my life besides merely caring. Father is going to take mother and me abroad this summer. I was keeping it a secret to tell you to-day, for I thought that you might join us; I’m so disappointed;” and the golden head buried itself in the slender arms that were clasped about the mossy stump of a fast-vanishing willow, and tears washed away the steely look that sometimes crept into Eileen’s gray eyes.
As she crouched thus, a change seemed to come over the perfect June morning; ragged clouds edged with rain came out of the west and darkened the sun; the singing wind turned to a gale that beat a path before it through the ox-eye daisies, and the ripening wild strawberries looked like blood drops in the grass.
The change came and passed rapidly, and with it Eileen’s emotion, and in a moment more they were strolling uphill toward her house as though nothing had happened. True it was she could not picture Oaklands without Ernest; that is, Ernest the man in the open, clad in his loose brown suit, carrying rod and creel, a figure that her imagination turned into a hero of romance. But the other Ernest, the man of the wagon shop, sweat drops on his forehead and uprolled sleeves, superintending some manipulation that he would not leave to the judgment of his workmen, repelled her forcibly. It was this second man that she wished to conceal from her friends of school and city. Many other women in country towns have felt this way at twenty-two. That individual work of the hands has fallen into disrepute is the fault of a feminine point of view as well as the encroachment of machinery.
“When are you going away?” Ernest asked, as he paused at the kitchen door and transferred the trout, wet moss and all, from the creel to the dish that Eileen brought. It was an old-fashioned blue and white platter with cut-off corners; in the centre was the picture of a ruined castle, while the border was wrought in a shell pattern. Ernest had doubtless seen it many times before, yet in the brief moment while he laid the trout upon it every unimportant detail was fixed in his memory, together with the outline of the ten pointed, flexible fingers, tanned with the morning’s fishing, that held the dish.
“Won’t you come in and see father?” Eileen said, without looking up. “He frets so at having to keep upstairs; only indigestion and overwork with his head, the doctor says. This was the beginning of the idea of the trip abroad, and at first, father wouldn’t go, but when he found that he could combine business with the journey, he changed his mind.”