Page:To-morrow Morning (1927).pdf/299

 left the Ford and plunged into the woods, going on until it was dark. He tripped over a root and lay, where he fell, face down, in anguish, pressing closer to the earth, his fingers tearing up the mold. He knew she would never come back. To press deeper and deeper into the comforting earth, until it received him, covered him, made him its own again. To have this aching body broken open, to be free!

Rain began to fall, sounding like little feet pattering over the dead leaves. He lay there all night, utterly crushed, crumbled. A deadly drowsiness numbed him after the dumb anguish.

In the morning he was almost too stiff to move, feverish, and shot through by flashes of pain. As he limped out of the woods everything was strange and vivid. The weeping-willow branches flowed like water weeds in a stream against the wet gray sky. Starlings, glossy black swelling in light and curving to shadow, chattered on the telegraph poles that held wires humming with life and death. Smoke came from the chimney of his darling's empty house, that Effa was getting ready to close, and melted into the wet sky. He saw everything through thin crystal—a touch would shatter it; the world would end.

In the bright green meadow where every ditch and little stream was full of cowslips that looked like rivulets and pools of pure sunlight, Hope was playing alone, the youngest angel in the streets of gold.