"Certainly. It is so quiet and peaceful out here, and, as I have no associations with this place, I can sit here without being unhappy or irreverent," Jerry replied.
"I came out to find you. There are callers at home now, so I'll give you my message here, unless you want to follow Mr. Ponk's example and 'soar' off home."
"That man interests me," Jerry declared. "He said some good things about his mother just now. And yet he's so—so funny."
"Oh, Ponk's outside is against him. If he could be husked out of himself and let the community get down to the kernel of him he is really fine wheat," York said, conscious the while that he had not meant, for some reason, to praise the strutting fellow. Yet he had never felt so toward the little man before.
"I have a special-delivery letter for you which came this afternoon. While you read it I'll go out to the gate and speak to the Ekblads, coming yonder."
Jerry read her letter—the one Eugene had written after his conference with Jerusha Darby in the rose-arbor. In it he had been faithful to the old woman's smallest demands, but the message itself was a masterpiece. It was gracefully written, for Eugene Wellington's penmanship was art itself; and gracefully worded, and it breathed the perfumes of that lovely "Eden" on every page.
Jerry closed her eyes for a moment in the midst of the reading, and the wind-swept cemetery and all the summer-seared valley of the Sage Brush vanished. The Macphersons; Ponk; Thelma Ekblad in the automobile by the cemetery gate, holding something in her arms, and her fair-haired brother, Paul; Joe Thomson (why Joe?)—all were nothing. Before her eyes all was Eugene—Eugene and "Eden." Then she read on to the end. One reading was enough. When York came back she was sitting with the letter neatly folded into its envelope again, lying in her lap.
York had a shrewd notion of what that letter contained, but there was nothing in Jerry's face by which to judge of its effect on her. Two things he was learning about her—one, that she didn't tell all she knew, after the manner of most frivolous-minded girls; the other, that she didn't tell anything until she was fully ready to do so. He admired both traits, even though they baffled him. In his own pocket was Jerusha Darby's letter, also specially delivered. He sat down by Jerry and waited for her to speak.
"Were those the people we saw on the south border of 'Kingussie'?" she asked.
"Yes," York replied.