She sighed and bent over the young flower beds. At an altitude of five thousand feet everything grew so unwillingly; yet everything that survived seemed so nervously vital! She dreaded Keble’s grandiose projects; or rather, the nonchalance with which he could conceive them intimidated her. There was something jolly about things as they had been: the cottage and the horses and dogs, the two servants, the rattling car, and the canoe. She thought, indulgently, of the awe in which she had originally held even this degree of luxury.
Her ditch was now fairly free of pebbles, and she placed the dahlia bulbs in line. As she worked, the thin mountain sunshine crept up on her, warming, fusing, gilding her thoughts. Spring could do so much to set one’s little world aright. In the winter when the mountains were white and purple and the emerald water had frozen black, when supplies from the Valley were held up for days at a time, one was not so susceptible to the notion of a universal benevolence as one could be on a morning like this, with its turquoise sky, its fluffy clouds that seemed to grow on the tops of the fir trees like cotton, and its rich silence, only intensified by the scream of a conceited crane flying from the distant river to the rock in the lake where he made a daily “grub-call” at the expense of Keble’s trout.
There was one other alien sound: the noise of a motor, a battered car from the Valley that brought mail on Tuesdays and Fridays. But this was Monday. The driver was talking to one of the hands; and a young stranger, quite obviously a “dude” and English, was looking about the place with a sort of eager, friendly curiosity. Then Mr. Brown appeared, and after a short consultation took the stranger in the direction of a road that led around by another route to the ridge.
An hour later, from her bedroom window she saw Keble approaching the cottage, his arm about the shoulders of the visitor. They might have been two boys dawdling home from school: boys with a dozen trifles which they had saved up for each other, to exchange with intimate lunges and gesticulations. She had never seen Keble thus demonstrative. Indeed, she had never seen him before in the company of a friend. She ran downstairs two steps at a time.
“Oh, Louise, here’s Windrom out of a blue sky,—you know: Walter Windrom who was at Marlborough with me.”
Keble had become suddenly casual again and shut off some current within him in the manner that always baffled her. She knew Walter Windrom from Keble’s tales of school life in England, and she had a quite special corner in her heart for the shy young man who had been his friend. She envied him for having been so close to Keble at a time when she was ignorant of his very existence. Walter could remember how Keble had looked and talked and worn his caps at that age, whereas she could only imagine. She remembered that Keble had marched off to war instead of going up to Oxford with his chum, as they had planned, and that Windrom had recently been given a diplomatic post in Washington. The image of Keble in a Lieutenant’s uniform awakened another memory: Keble had once told her that he and Windrom had played at warfare with their history master, and with her usual impetuosity she got part of this picture into her first remark to the new man: “You used to play tin soldiers together!”
“And Keble always won the battles, even if he had to violate the Hague conventions to do it!” Walter’s tone was indulgent.
“Oh!” exclaimed Louise. “But he would break them so morally! Even the Hague would be fooled.”
“The history of England in a nutshell,” agreed Walter. “We played battles like Waterloo, and I had to be Napoleon to his Wellington.”
“But you didn’t mind really, old man, you know you didn’t.”