She opened her lids and I saw the wonder of the sunrise in her eyes, and something mysterious and deep blended with the languor of sleep. And when she smiled at me and whispered my name, I quivered suddenly and the blood surged unbidden into my face. “Wanza,” I said, “Wanza!”
“Yes?” she breathed.
“Hasn’t it been wonderful, Wanza? Hasn’t it been miraculous? ‘Every hour of the light and dark’ is a miracle, but the sunrise is the greatest one of all. It is arresting. I can never drop off to sleep again if I waken and see the sky rosy.” I spoke with a fluttered haste, my words tumbling over each other in a way not at all characteristic, and when Wanza whispered: “Why, neither can I,” I laughed outright joyously.
“I found a wonderful wake-robin in the woods yesterday,” I began after a pause; “the petals were pink and strongly veined, and it was monstrous—monstrous! petals two inches—well, almost two inches. It must be a large-flowered wake-robin. The trilliums have been profuse this spring. This fellow was belated—its companions are all gone.”
“The robins woke up two months ago,” Wanza said, shyly eager. “And they have finished their courting.”
“Yes, they are very wide-awake, and business-like. But they have not finished their courting,—I am sure I witnessed a love scene yesterday.”
“Not really, Mr. Dale?”
“It looked uncommonly like one.”
In the growing light I saw that her face had kindled. It was lifted to mine, and she was drinking in every word. The emotion the sight of that kindled face aroused in me started a train of thought, and checked the words on my lips. Oh, in very truth there was something puzzlingly complex about my feeling for Wanza! I recoiled as from some revelation that I did not care to face as she continued to smile at me. But her eyes drew me, and I leaned forward and peered into them; and as once before I read their message, but I continued to gaze this time until the lashes swept down and the light was hid.
I walked back to the village with Wanza, and there was the tinkle of bells on cattle awake in the meadows, and the stir of sheep milling on rocky hillsides, and the crowing of cocks and the chirp of birds to proclaim that morning had come. We were almost at the village when she put a question to me.