“Yours,
“Ethan.”
With a smile as he thought of his friend’s perplexity on reading the note, Ethan folded it and tucked it into an envelope. Then addressing it to “Mr. Vincent Graves, The Boulders, Stillhaven, Mass.,” he sealed it, dropped it into his pocket and made his way downstairs to dinner.
After dinner a big blue touring-car chugged its way southward along the shaded road, with Farrell at the wheel and Ethan’s note in Farrell’s pocket. Ethan watched it disappear. Then, drawing a chair to the edge of the porch, he set himself in it, put his heels on the railing, stuffed his hands into his pockets and asked himself with a puzzled smile why he had done it.
[IV.]
The grass grew tall and lush under the gnarled old apple-trees back of the Inn, and the straggling footpath which led to the landing was a path only in name. By the time he had gained the river Ethan’s immaculate white shoes were slate-colored with dew. The canoe rested on two poles laid from crotches of the apple trees, which overhung the stream. Ethan lifted it down and dropped it into the water. With paddle in hand he stepped in and pushed off down-stream.
On his left the orchard and garden of the Inn marched with him for a way, giving place at length to a neck of woodland. On his right, seen between the twisted willows, stretched a pleasant view of meadows and tilled fields in the foreground, and, beyond, the gently rising hills, wooded save where along the base the encroaching grasslands rose and dipped. A couple of sleepy-looking farmhouses were nestled in the middle-distance and the faint whir-r-r of a mowing machine floated across the meadows. In the high grass daisies were sprinkled as thickly as stars in the Milky Way, and buttercups thrust their tiny golden bowls above the pendulous plumes of the timothy, foxtail, and fescue. The blue-eyed grass, too, was all abloom, like miniatures of the blue flags which congregated wherever the spring floods had inundated the meadows.