He tossed a long envelope toward them; the breeze caught and held it, then dropped it close to the château. Marjorie ran to pick it up.
“Miss Agnew,” said the Poet, lifting his hat, “a young gentleman will pass this way shortly; I believe him to be a person of merit. He will come overseas from a far country, and answer promptly to the name of Frederick. Consider that you have been properly introduced by the contents of yonder packet and bid him welcome in my name.”
“Ums a cwazy man,” Marjorie announced in disgust. “Ums the man what told a funny story at Auntie Waring’s party and then runned off.”
The quivering of the willows already marked the Poet’s passing. He had crossed the lake to the Waring cottage, Marian surmised, and was now returning thither.
Marjorie, uninterested in letters, which, she had observed, frequently made people cry, attacked with renewed zeal the problem of housing the knights’ horses, while Marian opened the long envelope and drew out half a dozen blue onion-skin letter-sheets and settled herself to read. She read first with pleasurable surprise and then with bewilderment. Poetry, she had heard somewhere, should be read out of doors, and clearly these verses were of that order; and quite as unmistakably this, of all the nooks and corners in the world, was the proper spot in which to make the acquaintance of these particular verses. Indeed, it seemed possible, by a lifting of the eyes, to verify the impressions they recorded,—the blue arch, the gnarled boughs of the beeches, the overhanging sycamores, the distant daisy-starred pastures running down to meet the clear water. Such items as these were readily intelligible; but she found dancing through all the verses a figure that under various endearing names was the dea ex machina of every scene; and this seemed irreconcilable with the backgrounds afforded by the immediate landscape. Pomona had, it appeared, at some time inspected the apple harvest in this neighborhood:—
The dew flashed from her sandals gold
As down the orchard aisles she sped;—
or this same delightful divinity became Diana, her arrows cast aside, smashing a tennis ball, or once again paddling a canoe through wind-ruffled water into the flames of a dying September sun. Or, the bright doors of dawn swinging wide, down the steps tripped this same incredible young person taunting the waiting hours for their delay. Was it possible that her own early morning dives from Mrs. Waring’s dock could have suggested this!
Marian read hurriedly; then settled herself for the more deliberate perusal that these pictorial stanzas demanded. It was with a feeling of unreality that she envisaged every point the slight, graceful verses described. Where was there another orchard that stole down to a lake’s edge; or where could Atalanta ever have indulged herself at tennis to the applause of rapping woodpeckers if not in the court by the casino on the other side of the lake? The Poet—that is, the Poet All the People Loved—was not greatly given to the invoking of gods and goddesses; and this was not his stroke—unless he were playing some practical joke, which, to be sure, was quite possible. But she felt herself in contact with someone very different from the Poet; with quite another poet who sped Pomona down orchard aisles catching at the weighted boughs for the joy of hearing the thump of falling apples, and turning with a laugh to glance at the shower of ruddy fruit. A lively young person, this Pomona; a spirited and agile being, half-real, half-mythical. A series of quatrains, under the caption “In September,” described the many-named goddess as the unknown poet had observed her in her canoe at night:—
I watched afar her steady blade