Harkless rescued the rose, pinned it on his coat himself, and, observing
internally, for the hundredth time, that the red-haired waitress was the
queerest creature in the village, set forth gaily upon his holiday.
When he reached the brick house on the pike he discovered a gentleman sunk
in an easy and contemplative attitude in a big chair behind the veranda
railing. At the click of the gate the lounger rose and disclosed the
stalwart figure and brown, smiling, handsome face of Mr. Lige Willetts, an
habitual devotee of Minnie Briscoe, and the most eligible bachelor of
Carlow. "The ladies will be down right off," he said, greeting the
editor's finery with a perceptible agitation and the editor himself with a
friendly shake of the hand. "Mildy says to wait out here."
But immediately there was a faint rustling within the house: the swish of
draperies on the stairs, a delicious whispering when light feet descend,
tapping, to hearts that beat an answer, the telegraphic message, "We come!
We come! We are near! We are near!" Lige Willetts stared at Harkless. He
had never thought the latter good-looking until he saw him step to the
door to take Miss Sherwood's hand and say in a strange, low, tense voice,
"Good-morning," as if he were announcing, at the least: "Every one in the
world except us two, died last night. It is a solemn thing, but I am very
happy."
They walked, Minnie and Mr. Willetts a little distance in front of the
others. Harkless could not have told, afterward, whether they rode, or
walked, or floated on an air-ship to the court-house. All he knew
distinctly was that a divinity in a pink shirt waist, and a hat that was
woven of gauzy cloud by mocking fairies to make him stoop hideously to see
under it, dwelt for the time on earth and was at his side, dazzling him in
the morning sunshine. Last night the moon had lent her a silvery glamour;
she had something of the ethereal whiteness of night-dews in that watery
light, a nymph to laugh from a sparkling fountain, at the moon or, as he
thought, remembering her courtesy for his pretty speech, perhaps a little
lady of King Louis's court, wandering down the years from Fontainebleau
and appearing to clumsy mortals sometimes, of a June night when the moon
was in their heads.
But to-day she was of the clearest color, a pretty girl, whose gray eyes
twinkled to his in gay companionship. He marked how the sunshine was spun
into the fair shadows of her hair and seemed itself to catch a lustre,
rather than to impart it, and the light of the June day drifted through
the gauzy hat, touching her face with a delicate and tender flush that
came and went like the vibrating pink of early dawn. She had the divinest
straight nose, tip-tilted the faintest, most alluring trifle, and a dimple
cleft her chin, "the deadliest maelstrom in the world!" He thrilled
through and through. He had been only vaguely conscious of the dimple in
the night. It was not until he saw her by daylight that he really knew it
was there.