“You do my orchardist hero a cruel injustice,” protested Fulton, “for he saw only one girl—and a very nice girl she was—or is!”
“What on earth are you two talking about?” asked Mrs. Redfield, looking from one to the other, while thwarting Marjorie in a forbidden attack upon the cookies. “It seems to me that you’ve been talking for years about this story, and I don’t know yet what it’s all about.”
“Hims witing books like the funny poetry man, and hims told me if I’m good and nice to you and Aunt Marian he’ll wite a book all about me, and my dollies, and how we builded shotums by the lake and in our yard; and Marian can’t be in any more books, but just be sitting on a wock by the lake, having ums picture painted.”
“Thank you, Marjorie; I knew he was a deceiver and that proves it,” laughed Marian, avoiding her sister’s eyes. “Let’s all go out and see the sun go down.”
Marjorie toddled off along the walk that bisected what had once been a kitchen-garden.
The sun was resting his fiery burden on the dark edge of a wood on the western horizon. The front door of the bungalow was ajar and Mrs. Redfield crossed the piazza and peered in. The place was clean and freshly papered: a fire burned m the fireplace—no mere careless blaze of litter left by workmen, but flaming logs that crackled cheerily. Her memory distributed her own belongings; here had been the table and there the couch and chair; and she saw restored to the bare walls the pictures that now cluttered the attic of the home she had established with Marian, that had once hung here—each with its special meaning for the occupants.
She stood, a girlish figure, with her hands thrust into the pockets of her sweater, staring with unseeing eyes at the mocking flames.
The Poet had spoken of the visits he paid in fancy to his house of dreams, and she half-wondered whether she were not herself a disembodied spirit imprisoned in a house of shadows. A light, furtive step on the piazza startled her, and lifting her eyes with the Poet still in her mind she saw him crossing the room quickly, like a guest approaching his hostess.
“It’s pleasant to find the mistress back in the house of dreams,” he said. “And she brings, oh, so many things with her!”
He glanced about the empty room as though envisaging remembered comforts.