"Oh, tell me, tell me all that has happened during the long winter!" she demanded, almost passionately, as I clutched both her hands and she stared up at me with an inquiring gaze. "You look so changed! So worn and tired out, as if you had been through great sufferings! Did you really suffer so much?"
"My greatest suffering, Yasma, was the loneliness I felt for you. That was harder to bear than the blizzards. But, thank heaven! that is over now. You won't ever go away from me again, will you, Yasma?"
She averted her eyes, then impulsively turned from me, and stood staring toward that steel-gray figure on the peak. It was a minute before she faced me again; and when she did so it was with lips drawn and compressed.
"We must not talk of such things!" she urged, with pleading in her eyes. "We must be happy, happy now while we can be, and not question what is to come!"
"Of course, we must be happy now," I agreed. But her reply had aroused my apprehensions, and even at the moment of reunion I wondered whether she had come only to flutter away again like a feather or a cloud.
"See how quick I came back to you!" she cried, as though to divert my mind. "I left before all the other women, for I knew you would be waiting here, lonely for me."
"And were you too lonely, Yasma?"
"Oh, yes! Very lonely! I never knew such loneliness before!" And the great brown eyes again took on a melancholy glow, which brightened into a happy luster as she looked up at me confidently and reassuringly.
"Then let's neither of us be lonely again!" I entreated. And forgetting my spade and shovel and the half-tilled field, I drew her with me into the seclusion of the woods, and sat down with her by a bed of freshly uncurling ferns beneath the shaded bole of a great oak.
"Remember, Yasma," I said, while I held both her hands and she peered at me out of eyes large with emotion, "you made me a promise about the spring. I asked you a question—the most important question any human being can ask another—and you did not give me a direct answer, but promised you would let me know when the leaves were again sprouting on the trees. That time has come now, and I am anxious for my answer, because I have had long, so very long to wait."