Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/317

Rh fare which Cicely spread before them seemed a sumptuous reward for their toil.

“I do like this kind of picnic much better than the ones where mother takes all the footmen, and the mayonnaise has to be scraped off things before I can eat them,” Cicely declared, lifting her foaming mouth from a beaker of milk.

Amherst, lighting his pipe, stretched himself contentedly among the pepper-bushes, steeped in that unreﬂecting peace which is shed into some hearts by communion with trees and sky. He too was glad to get away from the footmen and the mayonnaise, and he imagined that his stepdaughter’s exclamation summed up all the reasons for his happiness. The boyish wood-craft which he had cultivated in order to encourage the same taste in his factory lads came to life in this sudden return to nature, and he redeemed his clumsiness in crossing the swamp by spying a marsh-wren’s nest that had escaped Justine, and detecting in a swiftly-flitting olive-brown bird a belated tanager in autumn incognito.

Cicely sat rapt while he pictured the bird’s winter pilgrimage, with glimpses of the seas and islands that fled beneath him till his long southern ﬂight ended in the dim glades of the equatorial forests.

“Oh, what a good life—how I should like to be a wander-bird, and look down people’s chimneys twice [ 301 ]