Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/345

Rh the test. She was feeling still the grip of his fingers about her arm as he grasped it after she dropped her eyes and whispered good-night. She was exulting in it still! "Oh, am I made of such common clay?" she murmured.

There were only two nights with the big clock in Boston. On the third morning, Nathan had submitted to Rebecca the hope that had been trembling in his heart ever since her summons had arrived. There was a place, he said, (somebody at camp had told him about it) way up in New Hampshire, hidden in a crevice between two mountains, where a lot of the treasures he had been fond of as a boy were stored away, waiting for rediscovery—big hemlocks and virgin pines, tiny little maiden-hair ferns, and soft springy mosses, of a fragrance more beautiful to him than the camelias of China or the wisteria of Japan. He didn't know how Rebecca would feel about it—perhaps she didn't like mountain brooks and mountain trails—but he would like, just for once, to see how the shadowy woods of his boyhood recollection became her. He had always associated her, somehow, with things in the woods—brooks, flowers, fawns. His friend had told him there was a boarding-house in the little crevice. There were two, in fact.

"Perhaps I'd be calling at the one where you were stopping, and where I wasn't, and taking you out for walks once in a while, and showing you the things I used to think were pretty when I was a boy—if you were thinking, that is, of spending a few days up in that little place, just about now."

Reba replied smiling: "I was thinking of it."