All this wove itself into Vance’s own picture of the pale dark-haired young woman who had appeared to him so suddenly, and taken up the verse of “Kubla Khan” in her rich chanting voice. He had assumed her to be some years older than himself, and at nineteen, and to a mind as ignorant of class distinctions as his, such a difference of age put a much greater distance between them than the fact that Miss Spear lived at “the big house” (as the Tracys called Eaglewood), or even that she was to inherit the Willows, or meant to travel all the time when she was married. … Vance thought of her as goddesslike and remote, mistress of the keys of knowledge and experience; her notice had flushed him with pride, but it seemed a part of the mysterious unreality of everything in this new world. As he got to his feet and walked back to the gate of the Willows he felt his first pang of wounded pride. She had forgotten him; forgotten him because he was too young and insignificant to be remembered; because fellows called for her and carried her off in their cars; because she never stayed anywhere more than five minutes. …
Ah, how differently he thought of her now! Since her breathless arrival at the Tracy house on the previous evening, her summoning him out to the porch to accuse and excuse herself, the goddess had become woman again, and he was sure that the woman was to be trusted. She still seemed to him a good deal older than himself, but that now gave him a happy sense of ease and freedom, instead of the feverish excitement which the advances of a girl of his own age would have occasioned. …
As he waited in the darkness the early noises of awakening life began to stir. He heard the long eerie scream of a train far away; then the rumble of a motor truck down the turnpike at the foot of the hill, followed by the jolt of a lame farm horse coming in with garden produce; and lastly, close by, the cluck-cluck of the Eaglewood motor—and she was there.
“Vance!” she called gaily, half under her breath, as though instinctively adapting her voice to the whispered sounds of the hour. He had his hand on the door of the car, and in a moment was sitting at her side. “Now if she’ll only start!” the girl sighed. The car kicked and jibbed and stood stock still, as it had the evening before; then it was off with a rush, as if aware of the challenge to its powers, and amused at so unusual an adventure.
Vance was too full of happy emotion to speak. When Miss Spear said: “Did you think I was going to forget you again?” he merely answered: “No,” and she laughed, as if the simplicity of the answer pleased her, and then fell silent too.
When they started up the wooded road to the mountain there still lingered so much of night under the branches that she had to turn on the headlights, and the white stretch of illumination on each side of the motor was filled with layer upon layer of delicately drawn motionless leaves, between which the ruts of the road seemed to Vance to rise up and meet them as they climbed. All these details burnt themselves into his brain with a curious precision, as if he had been crawling at a snail’s pace through an eternity of overarching foliage, while at the same time the wheezy car seemed to be whirling him breathlessly to unknown distances; so that when the headlights painted the sudden picture of two gateposts of gray stone flanking a drive he was startled to hear Miss Spear say: “There’s Eaglewood,” for he thought they must long since have reached the ridge of the mountain above it.
They still mounted; the air was growing cooler; at last it was almost cold. The headlights paled gradually in the imperceptible growth of dawn, and when Miss Spear remembered to turn them out the road was scarcely less distinct, though everything appeared farther away and softer to the eye. At last the motor came out of the woodland, high up on a stretch of rough country road between fields. The sky arched overhead dim and pallid, with here and there a half-drowned star like a petal in gray water. They passed once more under trees, the world grew all dark again, and Miss Spear, stopping the motor, said: “Here.”
They were in a tree-shadowed trail leading from the road to the foot of a steep overhanging rock. “There’s Thundertop,” Miss Spear said. She jumped out, and Vance after her. They scrambled up from ledge to ledge and finally reached a projecting rocky spur from which they saw, far below and around, the outspread earth, its lonely mountain masses and habitable slopes, and hollows still indistinct, all waiting inanimate for the light.
“If it shouldn’t happen!” Miss Spear exclaimed. Vance turned to her in wonder. She had spoken his very thought; and to youth such coincidences are divine.
“Or if it had never happened before—if we were actually looking at the very first. … Ah!” she broke off on a deep breath; for a faint vibration, less of light than of air, a ripple of coming life, had begun to flow over the sky and the opposite mountains, hushing every incipient sound. There was a lull after that first tremor; a lull lasting so long that it seemed as if, after all, nothing in the landscape had moved or altered. Then Miss Spear, laying her hand on Vance’s shoulder, turned him about toward a break in the swarthy fell of the eastern mountains; and through it came the red edge of the sun.
