“All right,” he said cheerily, climbing in beside her. “I’m sorry I kept you waiting. Had a business matter to settle. Hungry?”
Rue, very still and colourless, said no, with a mechanical smile. The chauffeur climbed to the rumble.
“I’ll jam her through,” nodded Brandes as the car moved swiftly westward. “We’ll lunch in Albany on time.”
Half a mile, and they passed Neeland’s Mills, where old Dick Neeland stood in his boat out on the pond and cast a glittering lure for pickerel.
She caught a glimpse of him—his sturdy frame, white hair, and ruddy visage—and a swift, almost wistful memory of young Jim Neeland passed through her mind.
But it was a very confused mind—only the bewildered mind of a very young girl—and the memory of the boy flashed into its confusion and out again as rapidly as the landscape sped away behind the flying car.
Dully she was aware that she was leaving familiar and beloved things, but could not seem to realise it—childhood, girlhood, father and mother, Brookhollow, the mill, Gayfield, her friends, all were vanishing in the flying dust behind her, dwindling, dissolving into an infinitely growing distance.
They took the gradual slope of a mile-long hill as 96 swallows take the air; houses, barns, woods, orchards, grain fields, flew by on either side; other cars approaching passed them like cannon balls; the sunlit, undulating world flowed glittering away behind; only the stainless blue ahead confronted them immovably—a vast, magnificent goal, vague with the mystery of promise.
“On this trip,” said Brandes, “we may only have time to see the Loove and the palaces and all like that. Next year we’ll fix it so we can stay in Paris and you can study art.”
Ruhannah’s lips formed the words, “Thank you.”