Then for a mystic half-hour she sat and let her eyes roam the blue
Harpeth hills in the distance, that were naked and stark save for the
lace traceries of their winter-robbed trees. As the sun sank a soft rose
purple shot through the blue and the mists of the valley rose higher
about the bared breasts of the old ridge.
And because of the stillness and beauty of the place and hour, Caroline
Darrah began, as women will if the opportunity only so slightly invites
them, to dream--until a crackle in a thicket opposite her perch
distracted her attention and sent her head up with a little start. In a
second she found herself looking across the chatty little stream straight
into the eyes of Andrew Sevier, in which she found an expression of
having come upon a treasure with distracting suddenness.
"Oh," she said to break the silence which seemed to be settling itself
between them permanently, "I think I must have been dreaming and you
crashed right in. I--I--"
"Are you sure you are not the dream itself--just come true?" demanded the
poet in a matter-of-fact tone, as if he were asking the time of day or
the trail home.
"I don't think I am, in fact I'm sure," she answered with a break in her
curled lips. "The dream is a bridge, a beautiful bridge, and I've been
seeing it grow for minutes and minutes. One end of it rests down there
by that broken log--see where the little knoll swells up from the
field?--and it stretches in a beautiful strong arch until it seems to cut
across that broken-backed old hill in the distance. And then it falls
across--but I don't know where to put the other end of it--the ground
sinks so--it might wobble. I don't want my bridge to wobble."
Her tone was expressive of a real distress as she looked at him in
appealing confusion. And in his eyes she found the dawn of an amused
wonder, almost consternation. Slowly over his face there spread a deep
flush and his lips were indrawn with a quick breath.
"Wait a minute, I'll show you," he said in almost an undertone. He swung
himself across the creek on a couple of stones, climbed up the boulder
and seated himself at her side. Then he drew a sketch-book from his
pocket and spread it open on the slab before them.
There it was--the dream bridge! It rose in a fine strong curve from the
little knoll, spanned across the distant ridge and fell to the opposite
bank on to a broad support that braced itself against a rock ledge. It
was as fine a perspective sketch as ever came from the pencil of an
enthusiastic young Beaux Arts.
"Yes," she said with a delighted sigh that was like the slide of the
water over smooth pebbles, "yes, that is what I want it to be, only I
couldn't seem to see how it would rest right away. It is just as I
dreamed it and,"--then she looked at him with startled jeweled eyes.
"Where did I see it--where did you--what does it mean?" she demanded, and
the flush that rose up to the waves of her hair was the reflection of the
one that had stained his face before he came across the stream. "I think
I'm frightened," she added with a little nervous laugh.