God's Green Country Part 20

It was late when they turned in at their own gate. Earlier in the evening a neighbor had come in and lighted the fire and gone away again; the red light glowed warmly in the living-room windows. They went in together. It was the same room where they had hung curtains and adjusted furniture the day before, the same room Billy had looked back upon happily before he left the house that afternoon, but it seemed to have come alive, somehow. The firelight played over the brown walls, the rich red and brown and gold bindings of the books, the warm autumn tints in the curtains.... A new, strange shyness held them. She slipped out of her coat and he took it from her with his best drawing-room adeptness; she waited while he found a place for it. Then they turned their attention to the fire--there was always something that might be done to a fire.

But standing there in the fresh warmth of the blazing logs, with Billy's eyes upon her, serious and friendly, she realized suddenly how appealingly boyish he was in his anxiety to make her feel at home. And just as suddenly it dawned on Billy that she was, after all, just a wisp of a girl, such a rare, whimsical, comrady bit of a girl, who had staked everything so sportingly to come with him. And his arm went about her with the quick, rea.s.suring pressure of a guide to be trusted.

"We're going to be awfully happy here," he said, just as though he hadn't said it a thousand times before.

And the girl pressed closer to the good, rough sleeve of his coat and let it go at that.

The lights went out in the little house. The smoke still rose from the chimney like incense from an altar. Somewhere in the distance an owl hooted, a far off lonely cry--one of the calls of the wild places which seldom fails to stir the human soul with kindred desolation, or a throb of security in the nearness of its mate. And the old pines dozed in dreamy retrospection. They had watched other lovers come and go. They were at the happy beginning of a new story.