If I would! And if our parting took more than just the minute she had said, why, I will bear the blame—if blame there is. For I left her happy and with her eyes shining. And so I stumbled home along the shore, my heart singing. And my supper—for what clammer would dine at seven—was ambrosia and nectar, being plain corn meal mush and fresh milk. And when I had filled myself full of it I betook me to the seat under the old pine, and I gazed at the stars and wondered. I saw Arcturus, hanging red, high in the west; and Altair blazing above me. But, gaze where I would, I saw always that wonderful hair with the light upon it from the western sky; and those wonderful eyes with the light within them that made them to outshine Altair himself. And, gazing, I wondered if in all the worlds that revolve about those innumerable suns there were a being as happy and as content as I.
Of all the gifts of the gods, happiness is the most elusive. For they that most seek it find it not; and to them that seek it not, but go calmly about their business, on a sudden it appears, saying: “Lo, here am I.” And we must not then attempt to hold it fast, for ever it breaks away and is gone—for a time—and naught is to do but wait, with what patience we may, until it come again. And the more we have patience the sooner will it come back.
So the days passed, and some days I found happiness, and other days I found it not; but usually I had it for a bedfellow. And it was lucky that I did, for what is to be said of a clammer who cannot sleep? And each afternoon, when the sun was low, I wended slowly over toward my clam beds along the shore where the water lapped ever. And the Great Painter spread his colors with lavish hand, and peace covered the earth and was upon the face of the waters. And peace was in my heart, too, for there on the bank sat Eve, and she smiled to see me come.
And it befell on a day that there was a flat calm, and the sun veiled his face before he set; and, above, the veil spread out in a thin sheet, feathery and white, so that I could not tell where it began.
“Look, Eve,” I said. “To-morrow it will be stormy.”
And she said nothing, but only looked as she was bid, being content to take my word in all things. But Old Goodwin was not.
“Indeed!” he said. “What makes you think so, Adam?”
Then I was tempted. I might have entered upon a disquisition concerning cyclones and the sequence of the weather. But I put that temptation from me. It was but a part of my past.
“Oh,” I answered simply, “the look of the sky.”