“That will be very jolly,” he said. “There’s a full moon; I mean to have a try at a thumping big fish in the pool above.”
She nodded, and he rose and attended her to the door.
Then he lighted a cigar and called for a telegram blank.
This is what he wrote:
“James J. Crawford, 318 New Broad Street, N.Y.:
“I am at the Sagamore. When do you want me to return?
“James H. Crawford.”
The servant took the bit of yellow paper. Crawford lay back smoking and thinking of trout and forests and blue skies and blue eyes that he should miss very, very soon.
Meanwhile the possessor of the blue eyes was standing on the little foot-bridge that crossed the water below the lawn.
A faint freshness came upward to her from the water, cooling her face. She looked down into that sparkling dusk which hangs over woodland rivers, and she saw the ripples, all silvered, flowing under the moon, and the wild-cherry blossoms trembling and quivering with the gray wings of moths.
“Surely,” she said, aloud—“surely there is something in the world besides men. I love this—all of it! I do indeed. I could find happiness here; I do not think I was made for men.”
For a long while she stood, bending down towards the water, her whole body saturated with the perfume from the fringed milkweed. Then she raised her delicate nose a trifle, sniffing at the air, which suddenly became faintly spiced with tobacco smoke.