Sunday dawned, cloudless and warm. The rainy season had not set in in earnest, and, although farmers complained, the liverymen were well pleased that the roads were conducive to pleasure drives. A light wind blew from the south-east, just fresh enough to keep the air in motion, as at 9 a.m. Burton drove out of town with as good an equipage as the place afforded. The fields wore a heavy coat of dark green grain, waving in the breeze like ripples on a pond; the mirthsome gophers frolicked on the road, and clear-voiced barnyard fowl rent the air with their morning dissertations. As Burton drove up to the Grant farmhouse he was met by Harry and George; the former in his working clothes, but his brother dressed in his Sunday best.
“Wish I could get the fever too,” lamented Harry. “Here’s George with a special engagement at church, and Susy tidying up for a caller, and pretty cousin Myrtle putting the final tiffics on her fascination, while I come down to the prosaic business of running milk through the separator. But mind you, Burton, a word of warning. They say the road to a popular resort is paved with good intentions. There’s many in this district will aver the road to Crotton’s Crossing is paved with broken hearts.”
“Don’t pay any attention to him, Ray,” called Susy Grant from the verandah. Susy never troubled to “mister” her male acquaintances after the second meeting. “Harry’d be only too glad to take your drive himself if Myrtle was somebody else’s cousin.”
“And he’d be no man if he wouldn’t,” declared George. “Hang it, I’m kind o’ sorry I’m barred, myself.”
“Don’t say that,” said Harry. “Many a good wife has graduated from pedagogy.”
This allusion to Miss Green had the effect of silencing the younger brother, and in a moment Miss Vane appeared. She wore a dress of creamy white, such as on the night Raymond had first seen her. From the toes of her little kid shoes to the tip of her modest hat she was white, absolutely white, save where one large red rose nestled in the hat’s protecting shelter, and an historic brooch gleamed at her half-exposed throat. Her dark, waving hair, the wonderfully deep, lustrous eyes, the electrically sensitive mouth, the superb lines of her chin and neck, the whole supported by a figure chaste, symmetrical and beautiful, asked no grander setting than the emblem of purity she wore. Burton had thought her beautiful on the night he first met her, but he told himself it was her mentality that had so irresistibly attracted his, and as their acquaintance had ripened his delight had been in her alert intellect, her glorious voice, her easy grace of manner, gesture, and speech; but this morning he saw in her a ravishment of personal, physical beauty such as he thought had never before been vested in woman. The joy he felt in her mere presence, which had been to him a delightful and inexplicable mystery, was revealed in an instant as though a great cloud had been swept away. He recognised the magnet and the steel, wedded in an affinity defying every analysis of man, but everlasting and indissoluble as the eternal hills. In one brief glance the great light and the great responsibility had burst upon him, and his heart swelled and throbbed in a panic of prayer that he might be able to keep his secret.
“I bet you have forgotten something,” cried Mrs. Grant, to her niece, as Burton tightened the reins.
“I never bet,” laughed Miss Vane, “but Mr. Burton will defend my memory.”
“In that case, I bet she didn’t,” declared Burton, gallantly.
“Well, here is the proof,” said Mrs. Grant, advancing with a well laden basket.