Then she sat silently by him throughout their jolting journey over the prairie country into what seemed to her to be the Nowhere, listening to the wind chant, now requiems, now dirges, listening to its shriek and whistle, listening to it cry aloud and moan, die down to a whisper, then rise once more and wail like a living thing in unendurable pain.
Seth, too, by and by fell into silence, but from a different cause. The wind failed to distress him. He had become accustomed to it in the months spent in preparing her home. It was like an old friend that sometimes whispered in his tired ears words of infinite sweetness. He forgave the wanton shrieks of it because of this sweetness, the sweetness of a capricious woman, all the more sweet because of her capriciousness.
He was silent from pure happiness at having Celia there beside him, going over the same road with him in the old blue cart.
From time to time he glanced at her timidly as if half afraid if he looked too hard the wind might blow her away.
And, indeed, there did appear to be some danger; for the wind that had loved Seth from the first was apparently jealous of Celia. It tore at her as though to toss her to unreachable distances in the way it ripped the tumbleweeds from their small brittle stems and tossed them away.
Seth looked at her profile, white from the fatigue of the journey, but beautiful as alabaster; at the blue of her eyes; at the delicate taper of her small white hands that from her birth had done only the daintiest of service; at the small feet that had never once walked the rough and sordid pathway of toil.
Beautiful! Beautiful!
His eyes caressed her. Except that he must hold the reins both arms would have encircled her. As it was, she rested in the strong and tender half-circle of one.
All at once the wind became frantic. It blew and blew!
Finding it impossible to tear Celia from the tender circling of that arm, it wreaked its vengeance upon the tumbleweeds, broke them fiercely from their stems, and sent them pell-mell over the prairie before the tall blue cart, about it, at the sides of it, a fantastic cortege, airily tumbling, tumbling, tumbling!