Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/413

 Junction. You sit pressing your little nose against the window, waiting to see the mountains, and when the first one heaves up softly, all blue against the horizon, you feel a happy ache in your throat, and you look harder than ever. And by and by some one calls out 'Shley!' (you know he means Ashley) and you take your little satchel and stumble down the aisle, and the conductor lifts you down the steps and there is dear old Cousin Hetty with her wrinkled face shining on you. She only gives you a dry little peck on your lips, quick and hard, and says, 'Well, Marise, you got here, I see,' but you feel all over you, warm, how glad she is to see you. And you hug her a great deal till she says, 'there! there!' but you know she likes it very much."

She was talking as she walked, as if her words were set to music, her voice all little ripples, and bright upward and downward swoops like swallows flying, her hands and arms and shoulders and eyebrows acting a delicate pantomime of illustration, the pale, pure olive of her face flushed slightly with her animation. Every time she flashed a quick look up at him to make sure he was not bored, Neale caught his breath. He felt as though he were drinking the strongest kind of wine, he had the half-scared, half-enchanted feeling of a man who knows he is going to get very drunk, and has little idea of what will happen when he does.

"Yes, and then, and then?" he prompted her, eagerly.

"Well, and then you get into a phaeton. Oh, I don't suppose you have ever seen a phaeton!"

"Yes, I have," he contradicted her. "I've driven my grandfather miles in one when I was a little boy."

"Oh, you know, then, about this sort of—you have perhaps lived in a place like Ashley?" She was as eager as though it had been a question of finding that they were of the same family.

"I spent all my summers in West Adams, not so very far from Vermont."

"Ah then, you can understand what I tell you!" she said with satisfaction. "And in the phaeton you jog through the village, past the church, under the elms, with the white houses