"He is a Yank, and a traveler for Maddock & Co. of St. John, and his name is Hiram Sill—but I don't know what he is driving at any more than you do," replied Mr. Hammond.
The storekeeper invited Peter to call round at the house and to stay to dinner and for as long as he liked afterwards. Peter accepted the invitation. The Hammond house stood beside the store, but farther back from the road. It was white and big, with a veranda in front of it, a row of leafless maples, a snowdrifted lawn and a picket fence. Vivia Hammond opened the door to his ring. From behind the curtain of the parlor window she had seen him approach.
At dinner Peter talked more than was usual with him; something in the way the girl listened to him inspired him to conversation. At two o'clock he accompanied her to the river and skated with her. They had such parts of the river as were not drifted with snow to themselves, except for two little boys. The little boys, interested in Peter as a military man, kept them constantly in sight. Peter felt decidedly hostile toward those harmless boys, but he was too shy to mention it to Vivia. He was delighted and astonished when she turned upon them at last and said:
"Billy Brandon, you and Jack had better take off your skates and go home."
"I guess we got as much right as anybody on this here river," replied Billy Brandon, but there was a lack of conviction in his voice.
"You were both in bed with grippe only last week," Vivia retorted; "but I'll call in at your house and ask your mother about it on my way up the hill."
The little boys had nothing to say to that. They maintained a casual air, skated in circles and figures for a few minutes and then went home. For ten minutes after that the corporal and the girl skated in an electrical silence, looking everywhere except at each other. Then Peter ventured a slanting glance across his left shoulder at her little fur-cuddled face. Their eyes met.
"Poor Mrs. Brandon can't manage those boys," she said. "But they are very good boys, really. They do everything I tell them."
"Why shouldn't they? But I'm glad they're gone, anyway," he replied, in a voice that seemed to be tangled and strangled in the collar of his greatcoat.
When Vivia and Peter returned to the house the eastern sky was eggshell green and the west, low along the black forests, as red as the draft of a stove. Their conversation had never fully recovered after the incident of the two little boys. Wonderful and amazing thoughts and emotions churned round in Peter's head and heart, but he did not venture to give voice to them. They bewildered him. He stayed to tea and at that comfortable meal Mr. and Mrs. Hammond did the talking. Vivia and Peter looked at each other only shyly as if they were afraid of what they might see in each other's eyes.