I can’t sit still, so I climb to the hilltop. I am calmer in motion. I can see the village from the hilltop. It is being claimed by the twilight, the soft, slow, lingering spring twilight. There must be a lot of moisture to make such a brilliant aftermath. The heavens are so pink they have tinged the eastern hills. League on league the cloud waves blush pink as the heart of a seashell. The whole world glows. My mood catches the sky’s glowing mood. It is explained. He has been ill unto death, but he is not dead—he is alive—alive.
Something drops from my belt and I pick it up and stare at it stupidly. It is Dicky’s little letter. Dicky will know about Bobby. She will explain their presence together that night at Mouquin’s.
“Caroline, is your right hand paralyzed that I don’t hear from you? Do a lot of little tow-headed mountaineers and a garden that I know is at its loveliest now mean more to you than I do? I can’t understand your silence. I am coming home. I am to have my vacation now, and I am to keep on having it. Somebody’s with me. He is the secret of the prolonged vacation. I guess it will be in June. That’s the loveliest time of all. He will be here only a day or two, three at the longest, and I hate to think of him at that dinky little Marsville hotel. Hotel! Ye gods! Come to New York and we will show you some hotels. Dearest, won’t you, won’t you, have him home with us? There are some such ducks of places to spoon these moonlit nights in that heavenly rose garden of yours.”
Did I cry out in that sharp pain, or was it some wounded thing out there in the shadow of the woods? Steadily I finish the letter. It is to-day—now, at twilight—when the hack gets in, that Dicky and her lover are coming. She apologizes that we do not know earlier, but mammy and I are equal to any emergency. I do feel sorry for mammy, but I walk on straight into the sunset glare, leaving mammy to her fate. That is my only sensation—I am sorry for mammy. She does love to splurge when company comes.
Far down the road I see a buggy. It is coming this way. There are two people in it, but it is too far away to recognize faces. It is two men. It stops. One man gets out, the other turns the buggy around and drives back toward the village. The man who got out of the buggy walks on in the rose-red haze that wraps the world. The lilies of the valley that I thrust in my belt send out a sudden fragrance—it is the trembling of my body that has shaken them. I stop because I can’t walk on. I lean against a friendly tree-trunk.
The man comes on, moving slowly, feebly, I see as he gets nearer. I think of trivial things, as we do in crisic moments. Bobby is taller than I thought. The hat he is wearing adds distinction to one who is already [distingué]. The crease in his trousers will be copied by the young men of Marsville. From somewhere in me a faint satisfaction stirs that the party has left me wearing my best new gown, my hair done in a New York way.
Almost at my side Bobby stops, panting a little. I speak first. Women always do. I feel sure Eve opened the conversation when Adam waked from the sleep that deprived him of a rib and supplied him with a wife.
“So you have come again—and not alone this time.” It is not in the least what I meant to say.
“Did you know that I came?” Bobby’s low voice holds a note of surprise. “How did you know? But I suppose the boy told you.”
“I was in the garden. I saw you. I know why you came, and why you left.”