Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/84

 more real than any real joy could possibly have been, since it was outside of all halting actuality, purely ideal.

He turned with her into an open road that led up the side of a hill; and they stopped at the top of it to look back at the town, where it lay in the cup of a valley, facing the lake. He explained to her that, according to the geologists, this range of hills had been the shore-line in the "glacial period"; she wished that she had studied geology; he shook his head sadly. In order the better to see, they climbed the bank that edged the road, and stood together under a huge bare elm that raised above them its interweaved branches, fantastically touched with snow. He brushed off a great root that writhed up from the frozen ground; and they sat down on it to look over the city.

He was still sitting there when the sun came out, and he was smiling, with a rapt expression, at the horizon. She had her hands in a fur muff on her knees, and her cheeks were rosy with the wind. Without turning, he saw her so; and he listened to her with the face of a lover. Below him were all the houses of the town, and they had suddenly become the nests which love had built for its shelter. All the business of those streets—which had an hour before seemed so inexplicable to him—was now the joyful activity of men who were working to bring home the daily bread to their mates. All the misery and the sin of that city were the absence, the debasing, the denial of love. Geology, history—all the parched and