He looked at it without the slightest compunction. “I wanted to see, as it stood on that twig, which way the centre of gravity would fall,” he said. “Don't fret, Bessie! There are birds enough in the world.”
The young wife looked earnestly into her husband's face, as they walked on together. “Jack,” she said, “you might kill me, and then say that there are women enough in the world.”
He laughed, but looked at her kindly, as he made answer: “What would all the women in the world be to me, Bessie, if my woman were out of it?”
Could she ask more?
“Jack, where do you suppose the song has gone to?” she asked, presently.
“Bessie, where does a candle go when it goes out?” was the counter-question.
There had been a season in this man's life, during the brief bud and blossom of his love for Bessie Ware, when his mind had been as full of fancies as a spring maple of blossoms. But he was not by nature fanciful, and, that brief season past, he settled down to facts. Questions which could not be answered he cared not to ask nor ponder on and all speculations, [pg 218] save those which built toward an assured though unseen result, he scouted. The sole impression the bird had made on him was that it was a nice little flying-machine, which he would like to improve on some day. Meantime, he had much to learn.
The extent of his ignorance did not discourage John Maynard, perhaps because it opened out gradually before him, over a new, unknown path starting from the known one. He was strong, fresh, and healthy, and the very novelty of his work, and his coming to it so late, was an assistance to him. “I have a head for all I want to get into it,” he said to his wife. “When my brain gets hold of an idea, it doesn't let go.”
It seemed so, indeed; and sometimes when he sat studying, or thinking, utterly unconscious of all about him, his eyes fixed, yet glimmering, his mouth close shut, his breathing half lost, his whole frame, while the brain worked, so still that his hands and feet grew cold, Bessie became almost afraid of him, and was ready to fancy that some strange and perhaps malign spirit had entered into and taken possession of her husband's soul.
And thus it happened that, after two years, the house that Jack built was abandoned to one of his relatives, and the young couple, with their baby boy, left the forest for the city.