The couples took their way up or down the old Grass River trail or out across the prairie by-roads, with the moon sailing serenely down the west. Everybody voted it the finest party ever given on Grass River. And nobody at all, except his mother and Jo Bennington, noticed that Thaine had not left Leigh Shirley’s side from his first dance with her late in the evening until the time of the good-bys.
As the guests were leaving Thaine turned to Jo, saying:
“I’m sorry about that last dance, but I’ll forgive Todd this last time. Rosie cut her hand on a glass tumbler she dropped and I was helping Leigh to tie it up when old 229 Bo Peep started the music. Here’s the girl I’m to take home. Got your draperies on already. The carriage waits and the black steed paws for us by the chicken yard gate. Good-night, gentle beings.” And taking Leigh’s arm, he led her away.
“Gimpke is as awkward as a cow,” Jo Bennington declared, “and too stupid to know what’s said to her.”
But Rosie Gimpke, standing in the shadows of the darkened dining room, was not too stupid to understand what was said about her. And into her stolid brain came dreams that night of a fair face with soft golden brown hair and kindly eyes of deep, tender blue. Stupid as she was, the woman’s instinct in her told her in her dreams that the handsome young son of her employer might not always look his thoughts nor dance earliest and oftenest with the girl he liked best. But Rosie was dull and slept heavily and these things came to her sluggish brain only in fleeting dreams.
Thaine and Leigh did not hurry on their homeward way. And Jo Bennington, wide awake in the guest room of the Aydelot house, noted that the moon was far toward the west when Thaine let himself in at the side door and slipped up stairs unheard by all the household except herself.
“Let’s go down by the lake,” Thaine suggested as he and Leigh came to the edge of the grove. “It’s full to the bridge, and the lilies are wide open now. Are you too sleepy to look at them? You used to draw them with chalk all along the blackboard in the old schoolhouse up there.”
“I’m never too sleepy to look at water lilies in the 230 moonlight,” Leigh replied, “nor too tired to paint them, either. Lilies are a part of my creed. ‘Consider the lilies, how they grow.’”
“With their long rubbery stems, up out of mud mostly,” Thaine said carelessly. “I pretty nearly grew fast along with them down there, till I learned how to gather them a better way.”
The woodland shadows were thrust through with shafts of white moonbeams, giving a weird setting to the silent midnight hour. The odor of woods’ blossoms came with the moist, fresh breath of the May night. There was a little song of waters gurgling down the spillway that was once only a dry draw choked with wild plum bushes. The road wound picturesquely through the grove to a bridged driveway that separated the lakelet into two parts. A spread of silvery light lay on this driveway and Thaine checked his horse in the midst of it while the two looked at the waters.