“It’s beautiful here,” he said. Margaret turned to him and smiled. Her eyes were questioning.
“You like it?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied simply. He turned to Phillip. “You didn’t tell me it was like this, Phil; you never did it half justice.”
Phillip’s gaze moved over the scene. The sunlight was full and strong and bathed everything in an amber glow. There was autumn in the air and spring in the earth; nowhere, despite that here and there a pond was covered thinly with ice, was winter more than a suggestion. The sky was intensely blue; the distant hills were mauve; the nearer ones deeply brown with timber or freshly saffron with turf in which summer seemed only hiding for the moment. Phillip smiled softly, happily.
“I couldn’t,” he answered almost below his breath.
They had left the village some three miles to the east and were now topping a hill, Cardinal taking it with long, effortless strides and Tudor Maid trotting along at the edge of the road with happy eye and lolling tongue. As they began the short descent a new vista opened out before them. Half a dozen clusters of buildings were in sight, dotted over several miles of tilled field and meadow. Pillars of wood smoke rose purple and slender and straight into the golden atmosphere. To the right at the foot of the hill the road turned toward a ribbon of brush and timber that hid the slow meandering of a creek whose course the eye could trace for fully two miles; to the left it ran straight and ascensive toward a thickly wooded ridge which stretched, like a miniature mountain range, north and south—a “hog-back,” decisively dividing the present tableland from the valley beyond. Where the road parted a branch of the creek had formed a little pond, about the margins of which a group of laughing, shouting children were vainly striving to find an ice-crust that would bear their weight. As the carriage passed they paused to watch and utter shrill greetings. One diminutive youngster held up in triumph a pair of shining skates for their awed inspection. Margaret returned their greetings. The occupant of the back seat was recognized, and they passed on to a chorus of “Howdy, Mister Phil!”
John now saw that where the present road parted a second one began and led away in broad curves behind rows of leafless trees toward the ridge, and that somewhere in that direction spirals of smoke were ascending and specks of white were now and then discernible through the timber. Directly ahead of them huge iron gates between stone pillars were almost hidden by a cluster of massive oaks. Cardinal stopped with his muzzle against the rusted grilling and Phillip leaped to the ground and, officiously aided by Maid, threw open the creaking gates. Cardinal sidled through, the iron portals clanged back into place, Phillip sprang up, and they sped onward around a long curve of well-kept roadway between the gray and brown trunks of oaks and chestnuts. Margaret turned to John and smiled:
“Welcome to Elaine,” she said.