“’Sall right,” said Henry. He felt the answering pressure of her hand. In the dim moonlight, her face suffused with love and tenderness, seemed suddenly very beautiful. “’Sall right, Martha. I was just thinking. You go to sleep.”
Thus, in the gray light of dawn, in the agony of disillusionment, and with his sleeping wife’s hand in his, Henry Jones faced and solved his great problem. The change—for like all the rest it was only a change in him—came gradually. The turbulence of his thoughts slowly calmed; the ache in his heart grew less.
And then, clear and shining as a beacon light this new idea, this new feeling, rose in his mind. He seized it, lingered over it, gazed at it from every aspect. And then came a great sense of rest and peace stealing over him. He sighed, gripped his wife’s hand tighter, and fell into a dreamless sleep.
At breakfast next morning Henry was abnormally cheerful. Martha made no reference to his long vigil the night before, nor did he. But his eyes followed her around with a strange light, and his usually pink face was flushed even pinker with excitement.
After breakfast as he started for the store, he kissed her good-by with extraordinary enthusiasm.
“If it’s a good night to-night I’ve a surprise for you,” he said mysteriously. With which cryptic remark he turned abruptly and left the house.
The weather was perfect that evening—a full moon in a cloudless sky, and only a gentle breeze.
Refusing explanation, Henry led his wondering wife immediately after supper directly to the public boat-house at the lower end of the lake, hardly more than a mile from their home.
“I took the morning off,” was all he would say. “I bought something for you as a surprise.”
Into the boat-house he took her, expectant and thrilled, and there he proudly displayed a tiny green-painted canoe, lying upon a little platform that sloped down into the water.