"If you should get home before I do," it ran, "this is to tell you that I have gone to Mr. Fulton's with those papers I promised to take right after luncheon—I forgot all about them till just now. I'll be back in three-quarters of an hour sure; it's half-past five now. Supper's all ready now but making the coffee. Be sure and wait."
He smoothed the hurried scrawl out tenderly, feeling as if something hard and cold in his left side had melted with a sudden gush of warmth. Back in three-quarters of an hour! He laughed aloud at the sanguineness of it. Why, it took him forty minutes to go to Mr. Fulton's and back! And the idea of telling him to be sure and wait! The little goose! Did she think he would take himself off in a temper at not finding her, as he had once months ago? He went out
to the kitchen to put his flowers in water, and to finish slicing an egg over the top of the bowl of salad there—Gertrude had evidently just begun to do it when the package outside the window caught her eye. He put on some water for the coffee, and brought in an armful of wood; then he strolled to the gate to wait for his wife. The neighbor's two-year-old baby came staggering down the walk in front of the house. Allison caught up the child in his arms, and lifted it to the top of the gate-post, beside him. This was the little girl for whom Gertrude had been making a dress the other day; she had looked very shocked—Gertrude—when he had asked her if she proposed to make clothes for all the dirty little brats in the neighborhood, and had told him with some dignity that Dolly was a very pretty baby, and was kept as clean as could be expected. Dolly was a pretty baby. He tightened the arm that was about her a little, and began to talk clumsy baby-talk to her; her mother looked on with a pleased smile from her front door. The sun was setting, and a strange bright peace was on everything.
Suddenly Allison's eyes were caught by an unaccustomed sight—a crowd of people, men, women, and children, advancing down the road, slowly, steadily, and silently—very silently. He surveyed them curiously, ignorantly. Suddenly a man spoke to the one next him—Allison saw the dip of his head—and almost at the same instant a child—a twelve-year-old girl—put up her hands to shade her eyes, staring intently at Allison, and then with a loud shriek ran wildly, blindly, in the other direction. And then Allison knew that this silent company meant disaster to him.
They dragged him away before he caught more than a glimpse of what they had in their midst—the limp, white-faced thing in the silly pink dress he had liked. She had started home by the short way, they told him—the short way over the old bridge—the bridge that every one knew was not safe. And how it happened no one could say—perhaps she had stumbled and caught hold of the rotten railing, and it had given under her hand; at any rate they had found her in the dry river-bottom, thirty feet below. He looked at them very calmly as they finished. "She is dead," he said quietly, "there is no need to tell me that." And then, suddenly, without a cry or any warning, he toppled over against the man nearest him.
But she was not dead. He came out of his delirium and fever three weeks later to find her limping around the room, looking a little pale and tired, but very pretty in some sort of ruffled white dress, with her hair done up in the puffs and rolls he had always liked. People had been very good, she told him when he was strong enough to listen and understand. The doctor had said that he could eat eggs before he could eat anything else—so everybody had been sending fresh eggs. Mary said she was going to buy an incubator and start to raising chickens—they couldn't eat half the eggs that were sent in, even if they ate nothing but custard. Mary was the pretty girl that they had seen walking with Mr. Brown one Sunday, and had thought would be a nice person to have around. She was going to stay with them all winter; Gertrude was going to teach her German and music, and she was going to teach Gertrude how to cook. She was doing all the work just now, she and the neighbors. Mrs. Ferry came in every morning to scrub the kitchen and black the stove. They said Gertrude must keep her hands nice—Philip had seemed more worried about her hands than about anything else, all the time he was sick. Did he see how soft and white they were? She had been washing them in buttermilk—the doctor's wife had suggested that—and putting some sort of cream on them that Mr. Gilson, the young man who clerked in the drug store, had sent up by Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown had been so kind—it had been he who had sat up with Philip when his fever was at its worst—he had chopped all the ice that they had used from first to last. He was out in the back yard now, fixing—but there, that was to be a surprise.
Allison lay very still, smoothing his wife's hand, and looking out through the open door at the dry grass of the yard, browner, dustier than ever, and at the portulaca waving on top of the pyramid of stones. He could hear Jim's whistle as he moved about the yard; some one at the back door was talking to Mary in a hushed, eager undertone; over on her porch Dolly was singing happily, sinking her voice to a mere murmur now and then at a low remonstrance from within the house. It all made a sort of accompaniment to Gertrude's happy talk.
Suddenly she stopped, and leaned her cheek against his, with a little sigh. "Isn't it a nice world, dear?" she whispered.
He turned so that he could look into her eyes, and said, with a little tremble in his voice:
"It's a beautiful world!"