“Isn’t everything interesting!” she cried, giving Paul’s arm an excited little squeeze as they walked along the main deck again. “Oh, I’d like to live all the lives that ever were lived! Think of those women and the miners and people in cities and everything!”
“I expect you’d find it pretty inconvenient before you got through,” Paul said. “Gee, but you’re awfully pretty, Helen,” he added irrelevantly, and they forgot everything except that they were together.
They had to get off at Lancaster in order to catch the afternoon boat back to Sacramento. There was just time to eat on board, Paul said, and overruling her flurried protests he led her into the white-painted dining-room. The smooth linen, the shining silver, and the imposing waiters confused her; she was able to see nothing but the prices on the elaborate menu-cards, and they were terrifying. Paul himself was startled by them, and she could see worried calculation in his eyes. She felt that she should pay her share; she was working, too, and earning money. The memory of the office, the advance she had drawn on her wages, her uncomfortable existence in Mrs. Campbell’s house, passed through her mind like a shadow. But it was gone in an instant, and she sat happily at the white table, eating small delicious sandwiches and drinking milk, smiling across immaculate linen at Paul. For a moment she played with the fancy that it was a honeymoon trip, and a thrill ran along her nerves.
They were at Lancaster before they knew it. There was a moment of flurried haste, and they stood on the levee, watching the boat push off and disappear beyond a wall of willows. A few lounging Japanese looked at them with expressionless, slant eyes, pretending not to understand Paul’s inquiries until his increasing impatience brought from them in clear English the information that the afternoon boat was late. It might be along about five o’clock, they thought.
“Well, that’ll get us back in time for my train,” Paul decided. “Let’s look around a little.”
The levee road was a tunnel of willow-boughs, floored with soft sand in which their feet made no sound. They walked in an enchanted stillness, through pale light, green as seawater, drowsy, warm, and scented with the breath of unseen flowers. Through the thin wall of leaves they caught glimpses of the broad river, the yellow waves of which gave back the color of the sky in flashes of metallic blue. And suddenly, stepping out of the perfumed shadow, they saw the orchards. A sea of petals, fragile, translucent, unearthly as waves of pure rosy light, rippled at their feet.
The loveliness of it filled Helen’s eyes with tears. “Oh!” she said, softly. “Oh—Paul!” Her hand went out blindly toward him. One more breath of magic would make the moment perfect. She did not know what she wanted, but her whole being was a longing for it. “Oh, Paul!”
“Pears, by Jove!” he cried. “Hundreds of acres, Helen! They’re the tops of trees! We’re looking down at ’em! Look at the river. Why, the land’s fifteen feet below water-level. Did you ever see anything like it?” Excitement shook his voice. “There must be a way to get down there. I want to see it!” He almost ran along the edge of the levee, Helen had to hurry to keep beside him. She did not know why she should be hurt because Paul was interested in the orchards. She was the first to laugh about going downstairs to farm when they found the wooden steps on the side of the levee.
But she felt rebuffed and almost resentful. She listened abstractedly to Paul’s talk about irrigation and the soil. He crumbled handfuls of it between his fingers while they walked between the orchard rows, and his opinion led to a monologue on the soil around Ripley and the fight the farmers were making to get water on it. He was conservative about the project; it might pay, and it might not. But if it did, a man who bought some cheap land now would make a good thing out of it. It occurred to her suddenly to wonder about the girls in Ripley. There must be some; Paul had never written about them. She thought about it for some time before she was able to bring the talk to the point where she could ask about them.
“Girls?” Paul said. “Sure, there are. I don’t pay much attention to them, though. I see them in church, and they’re at the Aid Society suppers, of course. They seem pretty foolish to me. Why, I never noticed whether they were pretty, or not.” Enlightenment dawned upon him. “I’ll tell you; they don’t seem to talk about anything much. You’re the only girl I ever struck that I could really talk to. I—I’ve been awfully lonesome, thinking about you.”
“Really truly?” she said, looking up at him. The sunlight fell across her white dress, and stray pink petals fluttered slowly downward around her. “Have you really been lonesome for me, too?” She swayed toward him, ever so little, and he put his arms around her.
He did love her. A great contentment flowed through her. To be in his arms again was to be safe and rested and warm after ages of racking effort in the cold. He was thinking only of her now. His arms crushed her against him; she felt the roughness of his coat under her cheek. He was stammering love-words, kissing her hair, her cheeks, her lips.
“Oh, Paul, I love you, I love you, I love you!” she said, her arms around his neck.
Much later they found a little nook under the willows on the levee bank and sat there with the river rippling at their feet,
