“I’ve been waiting by the window all evening,” she said.
VII
I
“Not that way,” said Dreeme hastily as Deborah instinctively turned up the Leeminster Road toward the Saccarac River.
Everybody seemed to head in that direction as though there were a magnet at the end of the road attracting them irresistibly. He would change the scheme of things by facing another way, by facing an opposite direction than that in which lay the Westcott farm, the burned mill, the trampled bank of the river, and the creaking bridge that had groaned with the weight of the coroner’s buggy. She wheeled on her small feet and followed him obediently and they passed the dark front of his little house and the tarnished brass plate upon which was inscribed “Dr. Daniel Dreeme.” A moment later they were walking side by side through the main street of Marlborough, a main street that speedily opened into a tiny square faced by the small church, the post office and general store, and Mrs. Larkin’s boarding house where nobody ever boarded. The blank fronts of the scattered buildings gloomed at them incuriously. Though this was the heart of the community Dreeme could not hear a single beat. The heart had stopped pulsing for the night and even in the daylight it functioned but sluggishly. No lights glimmered from the windows of the houses for all the inhabitants had long ago crept into their beds and stretched out beneath their homemade quilts to wait uneagerly for another early rising. Yet the moon flooded the square and made it as bright as day and in that crystal bath they walked slowly, feeling the cold light run along their faces and ripple over their arms.
“Did you expect to see me tonight?” asked Deborah. Her voice was a thin silver wire plucked by a soft finger.
“No,” said Dreeme. “But I wanted to see you. I didn’t know it, though, until you came down the path like a little ghost.”
“I’m not a ghost,” she said. “I wanted to see you all evening. I sat by the window and waited.”
“Why?” he asked.
She was silent at that and only shook her head.
“Have you anything to tell me?” he inquired.
She shook her head again.
Moved by a sudden impulse he put his finger under her chin and raised her face. Her violet-blue eyes gazed at him calmly but something in them, some faraway message, set his pulses pounding furiously. He dropped his hand and looked away. Unconsciously they hastened their pace, passing through the square and the narrow side street that led toward the lower end of the town. The houses thinned out, falling away like specters from them, and an instant later they were trudging along a country road.
“If you follow this road far enough,” he said with an effort at lightness, “you’ll reach the real world.”
“I shall travel on it soon,” she answered. There was a break in her voice.
“What is the real world like?” she asked after a moment.
“It is full of people,” he said. “It is full of cities. It is like a noisy jungle. It is easy to hide there.”
She did not answer him. For a long time they walked in silence, their shoulders touching lightly as their bodies swayed over the uneven road. His hand rubbed against hers as they moved along the sandy stretch and for no reason whatsoever he resisted the temptation to take her small fingers in his own. There didn’t seem to be anything worth saying although he was conscious that she was waiting confidently for something to be said. He knew what it was and she knew, also, that both of them were saying it without words, without the use of futile speech. Their brushing shoulders said it to one another and their touching hands made it unmistakably plain.
“We’d better turn back,” he remarked finally. They were far along the road now and no houses loomed their dark bulks against the white sea of the flowing moon.
They turned and retraced their steps, walking swiftly through the loose sand and pebbles of the road. She continued to look straight ahead and occasionally he would glance sideways at the cool oval of her face. It seemed but an instant before they were back among the squatting houses, closed in by the silent walls and shut away from the full light of the moon. In the shadow of the frame-building that served for post office and general store she stopped and turned to him and said:
“I put my best dress on.”
A moment later he realized that both his arms were about her and that he was saying:
“I love you! I love you! I love you!”
He kept repeating it and she did not interrupt him but leaned against him listening contentedly. When he stopped she looked up at him and said:
“Shall I tell you that I love you?” He said:
“I’m babbling like a fool. I’ve been wanting to tell you this all day and I didn’t know it till just now.”
“I led you on,” she said soberly. Then she laughed with a quick feverish gaiety.
“I didn’t need to be led on,” he declared. “It was the getting started that was difficult. I’m a slow idiot. I wasn’t sure. I’m not sure even now.”
“That you love me?” she gasped.
“That you love me,” he returned.
“Oh, that!” she said.
She put both her slim arms around his neck and embraced him tightly. For an instant he seemed to be wearing a necklace of fire.
“It was because I loved you that I ran to you this morning,” she announced. “I wanted you to protect me.”
“Good Lord! Was it only this morning?” he exclaimed.
“It was only yesterday that we met,” she said. There was wonder in her voice, too.
He bent down to her
