"We'll find some old mahogany for this floor and white enamel for the

bedrooms if you like. What do you say?"

"Enchanting! I adore antique mahogany! You know how crazy I am about

the furniture of bygone days. I shall squander every penny on things

Chippendale and Sheraton and Hepplewhite. Oh, it is going to be a

darling house and I'm the happiest girl in the world. And you have

made me so!--dearest of men!"

She caught his hand to her lips as he bent to kiss hers, and their

faces came together in a swift and clinging embrace. Which left her

flushed and wordless for the moment, and disposed to hang her head as

she walked slowly beside him to the front door.

Out in the sunshine, however, her self-possession returned in a pretty

exclamation of delight; and she called his attention to a tiny rainbow

formed in the spray of the garden hose where Connor was watering the

grass.

"Symbol of hope for us," he said under his breath.

She nodded, and stood inhaling the fragrance of the garden.

"I know a path--if it still exists--where I used to go as a child.

Would you care to follow it with me?"

So they walked down to the causeway bridge spanning the outlet to

Spring Pond, turned to the right amid a tangle of milk-weed in heavy

bloom, and grapevines hanging in festoons from rock and sapling.

The path had not changed; it wound along the wooded shore of the pond,

then sloped upward and came out into a grassy upland, where it

followed the woods' edge under the cool shadow of the trees.

And as they walked she told him of her childish journeys along this

path until it reached the wooded and pebbly height of land beyond,

which is one of the vertebrae in the backbone of Long Island.

To reach that ridge was her ultimate ambition in those youthful days;

and when on one afternoon of reckless daring she had attained it, and

far to the northward she saw the waters of the great Sound sparkling

in the sun, she had felt like Balboa in sight of the Pacific, awed to

the point of prayer by her own miraculous achievement.

Where the path re-entered the woods, far down the slope, they could

hear the waters of Spring Brook flowing; and presently they could see

the clear glint of the stream; and she told him tales of alder-poles

and home-made hooks, and of dusky troutlings that haunted the woodland

pools far in the dusk of leafy and mysterious depths.




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