Jerome left off eating and leaned on his folded arms to smile. He was a sylvan creature, strayed out of pastoral days into the hazy regions of the Wabash.
He rowed the boat back, his father sitting in idle comfort on the other bench, and Lilian facing the oarsman. She enjoyed the grace of his torso, the veins swelling on his hands, the steady innocence of his gaze, with the same kind of satisfaction given by a scent of sycamore leaves, or the exquisite outline of an island. Billy swam after the boat, the water curling away from his breast; and before it could be beached he had left his web marks on the home sands.
The Marsh double cabin, with central chimney hospitable enough to engulf thousands of swallows, stood on a low bluff. Another and more imposing house was rising near it. The workmen’s noise mingled with stable-yard cackle.
“How I love to hear chickens!” exclaimed Lilian. “They remind me of some wonderfully good time I had when I was a child, though I can’t recall it. You have all the cheerful racket on your side of the river. And how sweet the building wood smells!”
“Some of that’s sweet pine,” explained Mr. Marsh. “The Babe, he carries them chips, and sassafras bark, and spice-wood, and all kinds of woods things, in his pockets.”
The Babe looked at Lilian, repeating slowly what he had told himself many a lonely day, in forest or on river,—
“I—haven’t got—right sense.”
“Oh, don’t say that!” she begged.
The father’s mouth corners fell into leather grooves.
“But Babe’s got idees,” he maintained. “He takes to nice things. So did his mother. I’d have built the new house long ago if she’d lived. And I wouldn’t build it now if it wasn’t for the Babe. Betsey and me like the cabin. We’ll miss the big fireplace, and them hooks in the jice beams. I took Jerome and Betsey down to Shawnytown to stay one winter, and I’d ’a’ died if I hadn’t come back here every two weeks.”