"And old for your years. And I—I am twenty-eight, and young for my years." Laydon laughed, too. He was giddy with happiness. "Gilead Balm! What a strange name for a place—and you've lived there always—"
"Always."
They were moving now down the alley toward a gate that gave upon the highroad. Near by lay an open field seized upon, at Christmas, by a mob of small boys with squibs and torpedoes and cannon crackers. They had a bonfire, and the wood smoke drifted across, together with the odour of burning powder. The boys were shouting like Liliputian soldiery, and the squibs and giant crackers shook the air as with a continuous elfin bombardment. The nearest church was ringing its bells. Laydon and Hagar came to the gate—not the main but a lesser entrance to Eglantine. No one was in view; hand in hand they leaned against the wooden palings. Before them stretched the road, an old, country pike going on and on between cedar and locust and thorn until it dropped into the violet distance.
"I wish we were out upon it," said Hagar; "I wish we were out upon it, going on and on through the world, travelling like gipsies!"
"You look like a gipsy," he said. "Have you got gipsy blood in you?"
"No.... Yes. Just to go on and on. The open road—and a clear fire at night—and to see all things—"
"Hagar—Why did they call you Hagar?"
"I don't know. My mother named me."
"Hagar, we've got to think a little.... It took us so by surprise.... We had best, I think, just quietly say nothing to anybody for a while.... Don't you think so?"
"I had not thought about it, but I will," said Hagar. She gazed down the road, her brows knit. The Christmas cannonading went on, a continuous miniature tearing and shaking of the air, with a dwarf shouting and laughing, and small coalescing clouds of powder smoke. The road ran, a quiet, sunny streak, past this small bedlam, into the still distance. "I won't tell any one at Eglantine," she said at last, "until Mrs. LeGrand comes back. She will be back in a week. But I'll write to grandmother to-night."