CHAPTER V
BOBOLINK on a grass-tuft piped ecstatic welcome to a long-lost friend, the sun. Five gray and weary days had passed since that amiable orb had bestowed so much as one uncloaked beam upon birds and men, and on each of those rain-soaked days, Jeremy Robson had racked his overstrained vocabulary for new objurgations against the malign fates which had spread a watery barrier between himself and Marcia Ames. Now the sun was an hour above the eastern horizon with a flawless sky outspread like a luxurious carpet for its day’s journey. Secure at that hour in the undisputed possession of the earth, bobolink swayed and sang, when to its wrath and amaze a shining missile descended from the sky and bounded with sprightly twists toward its chosen choir-loft.
“Sliced into the rough again,” said a voice of despair from the hollow below, and two figures appeared, headed toward the singer, who moved on with an indignant and expostulatory chirp, but found another perch still within ear-shot.
“Because you will not keep your head down,” reprehended the deeper tones of the young man.
Bobolink stretched his liquid throat in a love-song. He sang the warm sweetness of the earth, and the conquering glory of the sun; the breeze’s kiss and the welcome of the flower for the bees, and youth which is made up of all these and comes but once. Out of a full heart he sent forth his missioning call to young hearts; then, as the girl turned an exquisite face toward him, he waited for her response.
“That is four,” said she, “and I am not out yet.” And she hewed away a whole clump of innocent daisies, with one ferocious chop.
“You should have used a niblick the first time,” observed the young man.
Perceiving that romance had forever departed from the human race when, on such a May morning, such a maid and such a youth could satisfy their soul with such conversation as this, bobolink flew away to a tussock in an adjacent field where his own private romance was safe hidden.