Gone to Earth

by Mary Gladys Meredith Webb

Edward could find no reply to this.

'Are you happy here, Hazel?' he asked.

'Ah! I be.'

'You don't miss—'

'Father? Not likely!' She looked up with her clear golden eyes. 'You'm mother and father both!'

'Only that, dear?'

'Brother.'

'You've forgotten one, Hazel—husband.' His eyes were wistful. 'And lover, perhaps, some day,' he added. 'Good night, dear.'

She lifted a childish mouth, grateful and ready to be affectionate. Too ready, he thought. He looked so eagerly for shyness—a flicker of the eyelids, a mounting flush. He was no fool, nor was he in the least ascetic. In his dreamy life before Hazel came, he had thought of a sane and manly and normal future when he thought of it at all. Now he found that the reality was not like his dreams. The saneness and manliness were still needed, but the joy had gone, or at least was veiled.

'It will come all right,' he told himself, and waited. His face took an expression of suspense. He was like one that watches, rapt, for the sunrise. Only the sun stayed beneath the horizon. He called Hazel in his mind by the country name for wood-sorrel—the Sleeping Beauty. He left her to sleep as long as she would. He kept a hand on himself, and never tried to waken her by easier ways than through the spirit—through the senses, or vanity, or by taking advantages of his superior intellect.