“No, you’ll work till five o’clock.”
“Not unless you’ll stay!”
The eyes looked at me over the settle, and I looked steadily back. We each smiled a little, silently.
“Very well,” said she, as the head disappeared.
I read on, vaguely aware that the west was breaking, and the room growing warm. Presently I heard a window opened and felt the cooler rush of rain-freshened air from the fragrant orchard. Then I heard the painters come downstairs, talking, and tramp out through the kitchen. It was five o’clock. But I still read on, to finish a chapter. The painters had departed. The entire house was still.
Suddenly there stole through the room the soft andante theme of a Mozart sonata, and the low sun at almost the same instant dropped into the clear blue hole in the west and flooded the room. I let the manuscript fall, and sat listening peacefully for a full minute. Then I moved across the floor and stood behind the player. How cheerful the room looked, how booky and old-fashioned! It seemed as if I had always dwelt there. It seemed as if this figure at the piano had always dwelt there. How easy it would be to put out my hands and rest them on her shoulders, and lay my cheek to her hair! The impulse was ridiculously strong to do so, and I tingled to my finger tips with a strange excitement.
“Come,” I said, “it is after five, and the sun is out. We will go to hear the thrush.”
The girl faced around on the bench, raising her face to mine, “Yes, let us,” she answered. “How lovely the room looks now. Oh, the nice new old room!”
She lingered in the doorway a second, and then we stepped out of the front entrance, where we stood entranced by the freshness of the rain-washed world in the low light of afternoon, and the heavy fragrance of wet lilac buds enveloped us. Then the girl gathered her skirts up and we went down through the orchard, where the ground was strewn with the fallen petals, through the maples where the song sparrow was singing, and in among the dripping pines. The brook was whispering secret things, and the drip from the trees made a soft tinkle, just detectable, on its pools.
We waited one minute, two minutes, three minutes in silence, and then the fairy clarion sounded, the “cool bars of melody from the everlasting evening.” It sounded with a thrilling nearness, so lovely that it almost hurt, and instinctively I put out my hand and felt for hers. She yielded it, and so we stood, hand in hand, while the thrush sang once, twice, three times, now near, now farther away, and then it seemed from the very edge of my clearing. I still held her hand, as we waited for another burst of melody. But he evidently did not intend to sing again. My fingers closed tighter over hers as I felt her face turn toward mine, and she answered their pressure while her eyes glistened, I thought, with tears. Then her hand slipped away.