CHAPTER XXVII
IN WHICH THE OLD DOCTOR AND LITTLE HOYLE COME BACK TO THE MOUNTAINS
Cassandra, seated on the great hanging rock before her cabin, watched the sunrise where David had so often stood and waited for the dawn during his winter there alone. This morning the mists obscured the valleys and the base of the mountains, while the sky and the whole earth glowed with warm rose color.
Presently she rose and walked with lifted head into the cabin, and prepared to light a fire on the hearth. In the canvas room the bed was made smoothly, as she had made it the morning David left. No one had slept in it since, although Cassandra spent most of her days there. Everything he had used was carefully kept as he had left it. His microscope, covered from dust, stood with the last specimen still under the lens. A book they were reading together lay on the corner shelf, with the mark still in the place where they had read last.
After lighting the fire, she sat near it, watching the flames steal up from the small pile of fat pine chips underneath, sending up red tongues of fire, until the great logs were wrapped in the hot embrace of the flames, trembling, quivering, and leaping high in their mad joy, transmuting all they touched.
"It's like love," she murmured, and smiled. "Only it's quicker. It does in one hour what love takes a lifetime to do. Those logs might have lain on the ground and rotted if they'd been left alone, but now the fire just holds them and caresses them like, and they grow warm and glow like the sun, and give all they can while they last, until they're almost too bright to look at. I reckon God has been right good to me not to let me lie and rot my life away. He sent David to set my heart on fire, and I guess I can wait for him to come back to me in God's own time."
She rose and brought from the canvas room a basket of willow, woven in open-work pattern. It was a gift from Azalea, who had learned from her mother the art of basket weaving. Some said Azalea's grandmother was half Indian, and that it was from her they had learned their quaint patterns and shapes, and that she, and her Indian mother before her, had been famous basket weavers.
This pretty basket was filled with very delicate work of fine muslin, much finer than anything Cassandra had ever worked upon before. Her hands no longer showed signs of having been employed in rough, coarse tasks; they were soft and white. She placed the basket of dainty sewing on the same table which had served as an altar when she knelt beside David and was made his wife. It was serving as an altar still, bearing that basket of delicate work.