"Your salad days aren't over yet, evidently."
"I hope not."
The hour of talk had done the Colonel a great deal of good, and he was quite himself again. Some new magazines had come in the afternoon mail and lay on the library table. He fingered the paper knife absently as he tore off the outer wrappings and threw them into the fire.
"I believe I'll go up and work for a couple of hours," said Allison, "and then we'll go out for a walk."
"All right, lad. I'll be ready."
Even after the strains of the violin sounded faintly from upstairs, accompanied by a rhythmic tread as Allison walked to and fro, Colonel Kent did not begin to cut the leaves.
Instead, he sat gazing into the fire, thinking. Quite unconsciously, for years, he had been carrying a heavy burden—the fear that Allison would marry and that his marriage would bring separation. Now he was greatly reassured. "And yet," he thought, "there's no telling what a woman may do."
The sense that his work was done still haunted him, and, resolutely, he tried to push it aside. "While there's life, there's work," he said to himself. He knew, however, as he had not known before, that Allison was past the need of his father, except for companionship.
The old house seemed familiar, yet as though it belonged to another life. He remembered the building of it, when, with a girl's golden head upon his shoulder, they had studied plans together far into the night. As though it were yesterday, their delight at the real beginning came back. There was another radiant hour, when the rough flooring for the first story was laid, and, with bare scantlings reared, skeleton-like, all around them, they actually went into their own house.
One by one, through the vanished years, he sought out the links that bound him to the past. The day the bride came home from the honeymoon, and knelt, with him, upon the hearth-stone, to light their first fire together; the day she came to him, smiling, to whisper to him the secret that lay beneath her heart; the long waiting, half fearful and half sweet, then the hours of terror that made an eternity of a night, then the dawn, that brought the ultimate, unbroken peace which only God can change.