The long table built in the middle of the room was surrounded by a party of men and women. The men wore full black beards and a great deal of waistcoat, crossed by gold ropes. The women had round, black eyes, high-bridged noses and pronounced complexions. March tried not to see them, and tried to eat what was set before him. It made him sick to observe that Hetty’s place was filled by an overblown young lady whose bang made a definite downward peak between her black brows, and who had ten rings on the left hand and five on the right.
He caught the 6.30 train back to Fairhill. He had made up his sensible mind to talk over his family to a project marvelously well developed when one remembers that the inception was not an hour old when he swung himself off upon the platform of the Fairhill station. He would set out next week for the Adirondacks, set up a forest studio, and begin “serious work.” The phrase jumped with his mood. Nothing else would draw the inflammation out of the wound. He meant to bear up like a man under the blow he had received, to forget disappointment in labor for a worthy end; love, in ambition.
He took the orchard in his walk home from the station. It was quite out of his way, and he was not guilty of the weakness of denying this. He went there deliberately and with purpose, vaulting the fence from the quiet street at the foot of the hill, as he had done on that memorable Sunday when the orchards were “all a-flutter with pink.” One more look at the nook under green apple-boughs would be a sad satisfaction, and the contrast between what he had hoped and what he knew to be rock-bottomed reality, would be a salutary tonic. One look he must have—a look that should be farewell to folly and regret.
While still twenty yards away from the arbor he espied something that looked like a mass of white drapery lying upon the turf. He stood just without the drooping boughs fencing the sleeper about, his face framed in an opening of the foliage, as Hetty, aroused by Thor’s bound from her side, raised her eyelids and closed them again with a smile of dreamy delight upon eyes swimming in luminous tears.
“I thought it was you!” she repeated in a thrilling whisper, and again, and more drowsily—“Thank God!”
The church bells, chiming the half-hour notice of evening service, went on with the music of her dream.
Thor, enacting a second time the role of Deus ex machina, thought this an auspicious moment for thrusting his cold nose against her cheek.
With a stifled scream she attempted to rise, and catching her foot in the shawl, would have fallen had not March rushed forward to her help. Having taken her hands to restore her to her balance, he continued to hold them.
She struggled to free them—but feebly. Surprise and confusion had robbed her of strength and self-possession.
“I thought—they said—that is, Perry saw you take the train for New York,” she managed to articulate.