Hardly knowing what step to take, he turned down the incline toward the farm-house, thinking that he might gain his room unseen by the two ladies. At the foot of the hill there was a great, deep spring, and feeling thirsty he paused to bend down and drink from the surface, as he had done when a boy. Drawing himself erect, he was about to go on, when his eye caught a flash of a brown skirt among the drooping willows that bordered the stream, and Ethel came out, her hands full of maiden-hair ferns. At first she did not see him, busy as she was shaking the water from the ferns and arranging them. She wore a big straw hat, a close-fitting shirt-waist, and a neat linen skirt. How much she was changed! She was taller, her glorious hair, if a shade darker, seemed more abundant. She was slender still, and yet there was a certain fullness to her form which added grace and dignity to the picture he had so long treasured. Suddenly, while he stood as if rooted in the ground, she glanced up and saw him.
“Oh!” he heard her ejaculate, and he fancied that her color heightened a trifle. Transferring the ferns to her left hand, she swept toward him as lightly as if borne on a breeze, her right hand held out cordially. “I really wouldn't have known you, Paul,” she smiled, “if Uncle Jim had not told me you were here. Oh, I'm so glad to see you!”
As he held her soft hand it seemed to him that he was drawing self-possession and faith in himself from her ample store of cordiality.
“I would have known you anywhere,” he heard himself saying, quite frankly. “And yet you have changed very, very much.”
Thereupon he lost himself completely in the bewitching spell of her face and eyes. He had thought her beautiful as a little girl, but he had not counted on seeing her like this—on finding himself fairly torn asunder by a force belonging peculiarly to her.
He marveled over his emotions—even feared them, as he stole glances at her long-lashed, dreamy eyes, witnessed the sunrise of delicate embarrassment in her rounded cheeks, and caught the ripened cadences of the voice which had haunted him like music heard in a trance.
“You have changed a great deal,” she was saying, as she led him toward the spring. “A young man changes more when—when there really is something unusual in him. I was only a little girl when I knew you, Paul, but I was sure that you would succeed in the world. At least I counted on it till—”
“Till I acted as I did,” he said, sadly, prompted by her hesitation.
She looked at him directly, though her glance wavered slightly.
“If I lost hope then,” she replied, “it was because I could not look far enough into the future. Surely it has turned out for the best. Uncle told me why you came back. Oh, I think that is wonderful, wonderful! Till now I have never believed such a thing possible of a man, and yet I know it now because—because you did it.”