Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/36

26 too, was the way of the world. He wouldn't have liked it if she hadn't had one, he supposed. All the same, it was hard for him. It was hard for him that she didn't seem to care that it was hard. It was hard for him that he had to lose the daily sight and cheer of her. That it wasn't to him she would come in joy or in trouble. That she put some one else before him.

He knew how it was. His own wife had left father and mother and cleaved only to him, and never thought strange of it. How had her father and mother felt? He recollected that the mother cried when they left; and the father choked up and turned away quickly. But they had let her go. They wanted her to be happy. They cared more for her happiness than for their own. They knew the time would come when she would not have them and would be alone if she had no husband or child. Why, they loved her better than they loved themselves! They were glad in her happiness, even. And all at once, in his high-wrought mood, like a flash of revelation came a quick acquaintance with the joy of sacrifice. All at once he made it his own. He sat staring before him, as if at a vision of angels, while the rosy afterglow welled up and filled the sky and fell away; and then he saw a star sparkling up at him out of the water, as if glad of his sudden gladness. He climbed to break off half a dozen big boughs of the wild black-cherry, loaded with their pungent fruit, and saw Lyra, blue as a sapphire, up there in the sky above him, looking down into the pool; and all the way home he felt accompanied by something like spiritual and sympathetic sharers of his happy mood.

"Wal," he said to his wife, who was waiting at the gate, "I guess them cows are thinkin' it's high time o' day—"

"That's all right," she said. "Lally's milked. The farrer kicked, though, an' spilled some. Where you ben?"

"I don' know but I've ben a-rasslin' with the angel of the Lord, mother. Anyways, I come off with the blessing. Mother, I'm real pleased at this young man of Lally's. W'y, it 'll be jes the same 's a son to us!"

"I thought you'd feel that way w'en ye come to think," said his wife. "Now we'll have supper right away. I'm afeard the pop-overs are flat as flap-jacks, though."

He handed the boughs of black-cherry to Lally as he went in. "There," said he; "they're puckery, but they're good. Only they'll make yer lips so black he won't wanter look at ye!"

To his consternation, Lally burst into tears and sprang into his arms. "I don't care whether he does or not!" she cried. "So long as I have you !"

"Sho! sho! Don't ye go milkin' them cows again. You're all tuckered out. Don't you know—you've got him, and us too!"

It had been a bitter day to Lally. At first a little indignant with her father for the way in which he looked at her lover, she had turned the tables and wondered how her lover would look at her father—he city-bred, his mother's house a place of comparative luxury and elegance; he used to the refinements and graces of life. She had been away from home a long while; peculiarities had been forgotten or had grown strange to her; they were of no consequence. In her love and her reverence for her people, and in her delight in them, they had not worried her. But suddenly, looking at them with a stranger's eyes, they started out like sparks on the blackening ember. And then in turn she was indignant with her lover for seeing them. "If he does!" said Lally to herself, with mysterious, unspoken threat. "Look with disdain on them, indeed! I wouldn't have father know it for a farm! If he does!" And the days of alternate doubt and certainty, of hope and fear, made her so restless that she wished she could go to sleep and not wake till Dr. Lewis came. And then she cried again, in a passion of tenderness for him too. But he should see them just as they were—her mother's toil-worn hands and rustic air; her father eating with his knife; the king's English!

When at last the day brought Dr. Lewis, he had already been to see Dr. Payne, and had satisfied himself concerning the professional outlook. And then the doctor dropped him at the farm. "You're going to Mr. James's?" the doctor had asked, as they jogged along. "There's a young woman there,