Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/69



incomparable Lucy Tait was still but a star to be adored in her distant heaven when I went away from Little Arcady to learn some things not taught in the faded brick schoolhouse. It was six years before I came back; six years that I lived in a crowded place where people had no easy ways nor front yards with geranium beds nor knew enough of their neighbors either to love or to hate them.

I came back to the Little Country a mannish being, learned in the law, and with the right sort of laugh in my heart for the old school days, for the simplicity of my boy's love.

But there and then, with her old sweet want of pity, did she smite me again. Through and through she smote the man as she had smitten the boy. Treacherously it was, within my own citadel, at the very moment of my coming. Gayly up the remembered path I went, under the flowering horse-chestnut, to the little house standing back from the street, only to find that, as of old, she blocked my way. She stood where the pink-blossomed climber streamed up the columns of the little porch, and her arm was twined