So the girl had little to do there at her sunny open window, where mignonette and heliotrope and nasturtiums bloomed in pots, and the big bumble bees came buzzing and plundering the little window garden. And, except on Sundays, Marque had little leisure to observe her, although in the long late June evenings it was still light at eight o'clock, and he had, without understanding how or why, formed the habit of coming down to the deserted station platform to smoke his pipe and sometimes to fish in the shallow waters of Willow Brook, and watch the ripples turn from gold to purple, and listen to a certain bird that sat singing every day at sunset on the tip of a fir-balsam across the stream—a black and white bird with a rosy pink chest.
So lovely the evening song of this bird that Marque, often watching the girl askance, wondered that the surprising beauty of the melody never caused her to lift her head from book or sewing, or even rise from the table and come out to the doorway to listen.
But she never did; and whether or not the bird's singing appealed to her, he could not determine.
Nobody in the little gossiping hamlet of Caranay seemed to know more than her name; he himself knew only a few people—men who, like himself, worked on the Willett place with hoe and rake and spraying cart and barrow—comrades of roller and mower and weed-fork and mole-trap—dull-witted cullers of dandelion and rose-beetle. And mostly their names were Hiram.
These had their own kind in the female line to "go with"—Caranay being far from the metropolis, and as yet untroubled by the spreading feminine revolution. Only stray echoes of the doings had as yet penetrated to Caranay daisy fields; no untoward consequences had as yet ensued except that old Si Dinglebat's wife, after reading the remains of a New York paper found on the railroad track, had suddenly, and apparently in a fit of mental aberration, attacked Si with a mop, accompanying the onslaught with the reiterated inquiry: "Air wimmen to hev their rights?"
That was the only manifestation of the welt-weh in Caranay—that and the other welt on Si's dome-like and knobby forehead.
He encountered Marque that evening after supper as that young man, in clean blue jeans, carrying a fish-pole and smoking his pipe, was wandering in circles preparatory to a drift in the general direction of the railroad station.
"Evenin', neighbour!" he said.
"Good evening," said the young man.
"Goin' sparkin'?" inquired Si, overflowing with natural curiosity and tobacco.
