"Eat your breakfast and don't talk nonsense," her father said.
But her victorious mood revived while she washed the dishes. She felt older, stronger, and more confident than she had ever been. The news of the killing frost, which depressed her mother and quieted even Mabel's usual rebellion at having to help with the kitchen work, was to Helen a call to action. She splashed the dishes through the soapy water so swiftly that Mabel was aggrieved.
"You know I can't keep up," she complained. "It's bad enough to have the frost and never be able to get anything decent, and stick here in this old kitchen all the time, without having you act mean, too."
"Oh, don't start whining!" Helen began. They always quarreled about the dishes. "I'd like to know who did every smitch of work yesterday, while you went chasing off." But looking down at Mabel's sullen little face, she felt a wave of compassion. Poor little Mabel, whose whole heart had been set on a new dress this summer, who didn't have anything else to make her happy! "I don't mean to be mean to you, Mabel," she said. She put an arm around the thin, angular shoulders. "Never mind, everything'll be all right, somehow."
That afternoon when the ironing was finished she dressed in her pink gingham and best shoes. She was going to town for the mail, she explained to her mother, and when her sister said, "Why, you went day before yesterday!" she replied, "Well, I guess I'll just go to town, anyway. I feel like walking somewhere."
Her mother apparently accepted the explanation without further thought. The blindness of other people astonished Helen. It seemed to her that every blade of grass in the fields, every scrap of white cloud in the sky, knew that she was going to see Paul. The roadside cried it aloud to her.
She let her hand rest a moment on the gate as she went through. It was the gate on which they leaned when he brought her home from church on Sunday nights. She could feel his presence there still; she could almost see the dark mass of his shoulders against the starry sky, and the white blur of his face.
The long lane by Peterson's meadow was crowded with memories of him. Here they had stopped to gather poppies; there, just beside the gray stone, he had knelt one day to tie her shoe. On the little bridge shaded by the oak-trees they always stopped to lean on the rail and watch their reflections shot across by ripples of light in the stream below. She was dazzled by the beauty of the world as she went by all these places. The sky was blue. It was a revelation to her. She had never known that skies were blue with that heart-shaking blueness or that hills held golden lights and violet shadows on their green slopes. She had never seen that shadows in the late afternoon were purple as grapes, and that the very air held a faint tinge of orange light. It seemed to her that she had been blind all her life.
She stood some time on the little bridge, looking at all this loveliness, and she said his name to herself, under her breath "Paul." A quiver ran along her nerves at the sound of it.
He would be busy handling baggage at the station when Number Five came in. She thought of his sturdy shoulders in the blue work-shirt, the smooth forehead under his ragged cap, the straight-looking blue eyes and firm lips. She would stand a little apart, by the window where the telegraph-keys were clicking, and he would pass, pushing a hand-truck through the crowd on the platform. Their eyes would meet, and the look would be like a bond subtly uniting them in an intimacy unperceived by the oblivious people who jostled them. Then she would go away, walking slowly through the town, and he would overtake her on his way home to supper. She could tell him, then, about the frost. Her thoughts went no further than that. They stopped with Paul.