"Don't you want to come out on to the veranda?" he asked, glancing back as he stepped from the long window.
The words were nothing; but they were so steeped in the kindness of the look and tone accompanying them that they seemed to be words of tenderness.
She followed him out into the twilight; the others came too, and they sat looking into the street, saying little, but enjoying the refreshing coolness. Other people were at their windows, or on their steps; and occasionally an acquaintance passing stopped for a word. After a while G——, the liberator, came along, and leaned on the fence a moment—a man with a ridge over the top of his bald head, that looked as if his backbone didn't mean to stop till it had reached his forehead, as probably it didn't; a soft-voiced, gently-speaking lion; but Margaret had heard him roar.
"Mr. G——," said Mr. Granger, "here is a lady with two dactyls for a name, Miss Margaret Hamilton. She will add another, and be Miriam, when your people come out through the Red Sea we are making."
"Have your cymbals ready, young prophetess," said the liberator. "The waters are lifting on the right hand and on the left."
The next day they went to the seaside, the ladies going in the morning to set things in order; the gentlemen not permitted to make their appearance till evening.
After a pleasant ride of an hour in the cars, they stepped out at a little way-station, where a carriage was awaiting them. About half a mile from this station, on a point of land hidden from it by a strip of thick woods, was their cottage.
The place was quite solitary; not a house in sight landward, though summer cottages nestled all about among the hills, hidden in wild green nooks. But across the water, towns were visible in all directions.
They drove with soundless wheels over a moist, brown road that wound and coiled through the woods. There had been a shower in the night that left everything washed, and the sky cloudless. It was yet scarcely ten o'clock; and the air, though warm, was fresh and still. The morning sunshine lay across the road, motionless between the motionless dense tree-shadows; both light and shade so still, so intense, they looked like a pavement of solid gold and amber. If, at intervals, a slight motion woke the woods, less like a breeze than a deep and gentle respiration of nature, and that leaf-and-flower-wrought pavement stirred through each glowing abaciscus, it was as though the solid earth were stirred.