"Here we are back to the birds again," Liva said, sighing.
Timothy had put the violet in his coat pocket and he stood staring at the orange and flame in the cage: Her phototype and a violet—her phototype and a violet.
But all he said, not daring to look at her at all, was:—
"I can't make it seem like the Pump pasture to save me."
There is something, as they have said of a bugle, "winged and warlike" about a circus—the confusions, the tramplings, the shapes, the keen flavour of the Impending, and above all the sense of the Untoward, which is eternal and which survives glamour as his grave survives a man. Liva and Timothy sat on the top row of seats and felt it all, and believed it to be merely honest mirth. Occasionally Liva turned and peered out through the crack in the canvas where the side met the roof, for the pure joy of feeling herself alien to the long green fields with their grazing herds and their orioles, and at one with the colour and music and life within. And she was glad of it all, glad to be there with Timothy. But all she said was:—
"Oh, Timmie, I hope it ain't half over yet. Do you s'pose it is? When I look outside it makes me feel as if it was over."
And Timothy, his heart beating, a great hope living in his breast, answered only:—
"No, I guess it'll be quite some time yet. It's a nice show. Nice performance for the money, right through. Ain't it?"
When at length it really was over and they left the tent, the wagons from town and country-side and the "depot busses" had made such a place of dust and confusion that he took her back to the cottonwood on the slope to wait until he brought the buckboard round. He left her leaning against the tree, the sun burnishing her hair and shining dazzlingly on the smooth silver locket. And when he drove back, and reached down a hand to draw her up to the seat beside him, and saw her for a moment, as she mounted, with all the panorama of the field behind her, he perceived instantly that the locket was gone. Oh, and at that his heart leaped up! What more natural than to dream that she had taken it off to slip his phototype inside and that he had come back too soon? What more natural than to divine the reality of dreams?
His trembling hope held him silent until they reached the highway. Then he looked at the field, elliptical tent, fluttering pennons, streaming crowds, and he observed as well as he could for the thumping of his heart:—