“Yes, some,” Katy replied; “but there were dances every night, or sails upon the bay, and I had to go, for many of our friends were there, and Wilford was not willing for me to be quiet.”
This, then, was the reason why Katy came home so weary and pale, and craving so much the rest she had not had in more than two years. But she would get it now, and before the first dinner was eaten some of her old color came stealing back to her cheeks, and her eyes began to dance just as they used to do, while her merry voice rang out in silvery peals at Aunt Betsy’s quaint remarks, which struck her so forcibly from not having heard them for so long a time. Freed from the restraint of her husband’s presence, she came back at once to what she was when a young, careless girl she sat upon the door-steps and curled the dandelion stalks. She did not do this now, for there were none to curl; but she strung upon a thread the delicate petals of the phlox growing by the door, and then bound it as a crown about the head of her mother, who could not quite recognize her Katy in the elegant Mrs. Wilford Cameron, with rustling silk, and diamonds flashing on her hands every time they moved. But when she saw her racing with the old brown goat and its little kid out in the apple orchard, her head uncovered, and her bright curls blowing about her face, the feeling disappeared, and she felt that Katy had indeed come back again.
Katy had inquired for Morris immediately after her arrival, but in her excitement she had forgotten him again, until tea was over, when, just as she had done on the day of her return from Canandaigua, she took her hat and started on the well-worn path toward Linwood. Airily she tripped along, her light plaid silk gleaming through the deep green of the trees and revealing her coming to the tired man sitting upon a little rustic seat, beneath a chestnut tree, where he once had sat with Katy, and extracted a cruel sliver from her hand, kissing the place to make it well as she told him to. She was a child then, a little girl of twelve, and he was twenty, but the sight of her pure face lifted confidingly to his had stirred his heart as no other face had stirred it since, making him look forward to a time when the hand he kissed would be his own, and his the fairy form he watched so carefully as it expanded day by day into the perfect woman. He was thinking of that time now, and how differently it had all turned out, when he heard the bounding step and saw her coming toward him, swinging her hat in childish abandon, and warbling a song she had learned from him.
“Morris, oh, Morris!” she cried, as he ran eagerly forward; “I am so glad to see you. It seems so nice to be with you once more here in the dear old woods. Don’t get up—please don’t get up,” she continued, as he started to rise.
She was standing before him, a hand on either side of his face, into which she was looking quite as wistfully as he was regarding her. Something she missed in his manner, which troubled her; and thinking she knew what it was she said to him, “Why don’t you kiss me, Morris? You used to. Ain’t you glad to see me?”
“Yes, very glad,” he answered, and drawing her down beside him, he kissed her twice, but so gravely, that Katy was not satisfied at all, and tears gathered in her eyes as she tried to think what ailed Morris.
He was very thin, and there were a few white hairs about his temples, so that, though four years younger than her husband, he seemed to her much older, quite grandfatherly in fact, and this accounted for the liberties she took, asking what was the matter, and trying to make him like her again, by assuring him that she was not as vain and foolish as he might suppose from what Helen had probably told him of her life since leaving Silverton. “I do not like it at all,” she said. “I am in it, and must conform; but, oh Morris! you don’t know how much happier I should be if Wilford were just like you, and lived at Linwood instead of New York. I should be so happy here with baby all the time.”
It was well she spoke that name, for Morris could not have borne much more; but the mention of her child quieted him at once, so that he could calmly tell her she was the same to him she always had been, while with his next breath he asked, “Where is your baby, Katy?” adding with a smile, “I can remember when you were a baby, and I held you in my arms.”
“Can you really?” Katy said: and as if that remembrance made him older than the hills, she nestled her curly head against his shoulder, while she told him of her bright-eyed darling, and as she talked, the mother-love which spread itself over her girlish face made it more beautiful than anything Morris had ever seen.
“Surely an angel’s countenance cannot be fairer, purer than hers,” he thought, as she talked of the only thing which had a power to separate her from him, making her seem as a friend, or at most as a beloved sister.