Some weeks later, at dusk on a calm evening, Miles and his sole companion sat outdoors for the first time that year. A little bench—Tony’s handiwork—girdled the hackmatack, so that while leaning against the same trunk, each saw a different quarter of the valley, and talked over the shoulder lazily, facing two cardinal points, with thoughts as far asunder. The time was neither spring nor summer, but that rare Arcadian interval, too brief for a season, too elusive for even a transition, and yet in the calendar of sense marked off as plain as a festival. The night fell neither warm nor cool; a tempered fragrance of blossoms drew down, without stir of air, from the orchard over the hill; lower field and shore, river and farthest ridge, lay confounded in blackness under the stars, land and water parted only by faint zigzag margins, where the last edge of daylight lined some inlet or hooked about a promontory.

“Them days,” continued Ella in a distant monotone, “the Injuns camped in back of ar house at Sweet Water. Old Lewie Neptune, he was chieft. An’ nights he got drunk, he’d pitch ’em outdoor, so’s all hands would come beg for in. Midnight an’ bitter cold, sometimes, women-fo’ks an’ youngsters, they rout us out o’ bed. Big Mary, Æneas Moon an’ his brother Peter, an’ Lolas an’ Francises an’ Socabasins,—whol’ slews of ’em, all wropped an’ huddledt up in blankets, scairt, an’ sayin’ they’d be killed. I see the kitchen floor covered with ’em, many the time, sleepin’ curled round the stove—Who’s that?”

A flurry of footsteps came up out of the dark; some one raced by them toward the house.

“We’re out here,” called Miles, rising. “What’s wanted?”

“Oh!” The runner stopped, and returned panting. “I’ve come. You told me to.”

“Anna!” he cried joyfully.

She stood for an instant motionless, breathing hard; gave a little failure of a laugh; then spoke quickly, in a voice meant to be calm.

“I stood them as long as I could. Now you must tell me where to go. Those men! While my father stayed himself, I had somebody; but now he’s—they’re both against me.” She broke off, as though stifled. “I’ll never go back; I won’t, I won’t!”

Ella suddenly moved between them.

“Come in the house,” she ordered coldly. “Can’t see ye. If the’ ’s trouble, we’ll take a light to it, first thing.”

They went in together to the front room. Miles lighted the candle (which, since Tony’s day, replaced the lamp) and over the trembling leaf-point of flame saw the girl’s head start into radiance like a vision. She stood before them with a half-shy, half-defiant composure; but her eyes and her brown cheeks told another story, a pulse throbbed in her bare throat, and under the thin blue cloth her breathing fluttered deeply.

“He tried to beat me,” she said, with the same quiet scorn. “Me, after all the time I was—”Ella had stood watching with eyes puckered skeptically, and round face set in lines of no compromise. But now, without warning, she flung both her stout arms round the refugee.

“Wild Injuns!” she fumed. “What was I tellin’ ye? You’re all alike, you men-fo’ks. There, there, poor thing!” Awkward and motherly, she stroked the girl’s bright hair, scolding and consoling in a breath. “There, there, nubbin, you’re all of a quiver—all on a string. Worse ’n old Neptune, they are!—Miles, I left my knittin’ somewheres by that tree. Jest you hyper out an’ find it.”

Needles and all, it lay on the table before them, but Miles obeyed. He paced back and forth under the stars, watching the lighted window. He should be sorry for her, ran his thought. But his one clear emotion was nothing of the kind; buoyantly, against reason and through suspense, rioted the conviction that all was well. When the voices ceased within, he entered, and found the two women sitting like friends agreed. They smiled at him rather uncertainly.

“Well,” exclaimed the elder, whipping a handkerchief out of sight. “That’s settled, anyhow. She’ll stay here with us till she finds somewheres better.”

“But I forgot,” the girl objected. “All my things are there.”

“I’ll get them,” offered Miles.

“You’d look well,” the servant retorted grimly. “I’ll go my own self. Incidental, I’ll see that pair o’ shoats. And they won’t ask me to set and come again, either!”

“But,” said the girl, “they’ll come after me.”

“Let ’em!” cried Ella, with sudden extravagance. “I’ll set ’em down so hard they—they can comb their hair with their spinal columes! Let ’em come.”

For that night no one accepted the challenge; and next morning Ella promptly descended on Alward’s, to return in ferocious triumph, bearing a little armful of spoils.

“There’s your clothes!” she cried with the voice of Deborah. “A haley old mess that house is already, without ye! What did I say to ’em? Never you mind. They know more ’n they did. The fear o’ the Lord’s the beginnin’ o’ wisdom. I said what was vouched to me that hour. I bit a piece out o’ the roof!”

At all events she had determined the situation, and from now forward there were three in the house. It seemed incredible. Miles passed the first days in a dream, a revolution of thoughts and habits. To have this shining guest come and go upon the stairs, or sit at table like a mortal, or read beside the window on rainy afternoons, or move at night overhead in Tony’s chamber, not only threw all indoor routine into the bright confusion of drama, but changed the very air upon the hills, the light on the waters. The valley was visited, like the plains of Mamre.

And even when this earliest wonder passed, and they began to live as though always under the same roof, he could not find the old bearings. The change had scattered, tossed, and revived his faculties, as haymakers pitch a mouldy windrow abroad in the sun. By an odd transfer, she who rightfully should radiate all that was new and strange, had slipped at once into customary life, established, familiar, like a thing of childhood; and when they walked the shore, dug in the garden side by side, or tended lamps in the early evening, it was she who always had belonged there: all other things—trees he had seen grow, rocks he knew in every line and fissure, paths he could follow running in the dark—had altered as after long absence or some new gift of sight.

It was a happy, incomprehensible time; none the less happy, although he felt somehow that vague elements were weaving into danger, that an unknown thread guided them in a maze. Perhaps it was only that their delight would keep no even level, but daily mounted; perhaps that in their simplest talk, when their friendship seemed the oldest, there fell a silence, a chance word, a shock of difference or agreement, a flash of bygone things, to show how unerringly their lines converged, across what gulfs.

One afternoon, when summer had glowed and ripened, they revisited Kilmarnock Brook. Alders flanked the bend through a long meadow, mapping it distantly as a curved wall of darker green, and losing it, to near approach, in a cool, low wood where grassy clearings wound so intricately that a stranger (unless he made the one plunge through tangle) might wander among leaves, see the oozy light quivering over them from below, and hear the invisible water sing like a stream of Tantalus. But Anna and Miles knew all these interlocked recesses, and, threading them in and out, had reached their own secret place,—an alder closet, where a tiny crescent of lawn curved round a pool. On a bank which ran smoothly into brown water, they sat a little apart, in shadow. Above them sunlight dappled the leaves, and day-flies danced in brief ecstasy; below, with a delicate breath of steeping earth and roots and brookmint, the water stole away silently, to take up its tinkling narrative round the next bend.

For a long time neither had spoken. Suddenly Miles laughed.

“Ophelia!”

She was looking past her open book, considering the pool.

“You needn’t call names,” she replied, without rousing. “Besides, I don’t know what you mean.”

“‘Read on this book!’” he scoffed. “The old chucklehead knew! No girl would ever read in one.”

“A lot you know about them!” She laughed at him, with a sidelong glance, but quickly returned to her contemplation. “I was thinking.”

“What?”

She shook her head. A leaf-pattern of shadows and golden flame settled once more upon it, trembling.

“The river-drivers,” she answered at last. “I was only thinking about the river-drivers.”

Following her glance, he tried, as he had so often tried in the last weeks, to see with her eyes. The peace of the pool beside them, like all peace in Nature, was an illusion. Minnows steered over the brown sand, or whipped their magnified shadows, blurred and globular, through sunny patches under the farther bank; even where the water lay most dark and thick, weeds tugged slowly at the tether; and over the surface her “river-drivers,” snapping and kicking between wind and water, floated erratically down an imperceptible current.

“About those?” he asked incredulously. “What, those beetles?”

“Yes.” Her eyes danced with that look of hers which he had never seen in any other person,—a look both grave and whimsical. “Yes, they’re only beetles. See, though: they scoot here and there, but always head upstream. They can’t have any reason to, and it’s so much easier going down. And still they’re stubborn, and fight along. I wonder—I think they must have an Idea.”

“You’re a funny girl!” he laughed. Yet as he watched, the darting insects began to appear not wholly insensate.

“Now the fish down there,” she continued, as though to herself, “they nose about their business. And the day-flies—with them it’s all dancing,—just eat, drink, and be merry. But the river-drivers—see that one, floating on the blade of grass, all tired out; and there he goes again, up and up, and all the time carried below. They’re like—like people. They’re betwixt and between, like us. And it may be no use. But they must. Their Idea. And the stream flows down and down, and sweeps everything—”

Her words were quiet as the brook beyond.

“A parable,” said Miles.

His voice rose no higher; for both were suddenly a little awed, as though their spirits had caught some rushing echo of that broader flood, the irrevocable and universal. And now some influence as wide, something neither gradual nor swift, closed about them powerfully. They had leaned forward, shoulder to shoulder, over the brown pool; but at this mystical, blind accession, each felt the other tremble and draw back.

A kingfisher chattered angrily, away in the upper reaches. It was the recurring silence, however, that alarmed. Of all their silences, this seemed as it were the end, the turning, and the explication. But still it endured, throbbing with a perilous energy.

Slowly, in a kind of sleep-waking effort, the girl got upon her feet.

“Come,” she said. Her face, in the alder shadows, was very pale. A shiver of light from the brook played golden about her throat, like the reflected glow of buttercups in the children’s game.

“Come,” she repeated. “We can’t—we must get home.”

Moved by the helplessness of that command, he followed. They crossed the sunset pastures almost without word or look, like pilgrims crossing the Debatable Ground. And when they had climbed the last hill, and come racing steeply down toward the river and the house, she went straight to the shelter of Ella’s kitchen.

He did not see her alone again till that evening. Meanwhile he had walked the shore, raging at himself for what had passed, put almost beside his reason at thought of what might come. After blindness, it was an aching sight that disclosed how their friendship—so wholesome, firm, and precious—could change at a breath, and in the most tranquil moment of security could totter above unknown deeps. Was he then worse than Tony, and their house no better than the drunkard’s? This girl had fled to him; she had taken his promises, was here upon his honor; and now, because he had willfully drifted down a pleasant way, they had reached such a pass that—He closed the thought with a groan. By some detestable trick, he foresaw, their very speech could no longer be free and honest.

She made no offer, that evening, to go down with him to the lamps; and he was rather glad of the fact than sorry at its cause. To walk alone from tower to tower, through the cool firs and cedars, proved a respite. Yet when he faced the hill to return, trepidation seized him afresh. He climbed toward the house, vexed and wondering; and for the second time in all his memory, was afraid to enter.

She sat behind the candle-flame, a great book flattened wide on the table, and her head bent over it as for dear life. All the brightness in the room had gathered in this corner, and at first he dared not go near. But it was now or never with his play-acting; and so, choosing a book at random, he sat down opposite her resolutely, to begin the pretense that all things remained as before.

Ella had gone to bed with the birds. Except the two readers, all the world might have been asleep. Their breathing, and the tick of a death watch in the wall, made the only sounds in house or valley. For all the window stood open, the little blade of light between them reared without wavering. This silence at full stretch, this preposterous calmness at close range, were alike unreal and unbearable. His book appeared to be “The Polar and Tropical Worlds,” a treasury of boyhood; but the pictures swam in a blur—icebergs, gorillas, the open coffin on Spitzbergen, the march of land-crabs through a palm-grove, all an empty jumble. Sometimes his eyesight escaped the page; but then perhaps he found her looking up, by the same chance; caught for an instant, as her eyes dropped, the last of a pitiful, appealing light; and plunged into his book again, like a desperate man hunting a text of divination.

He might thus have turned a hundred pages, and she none at all, when the contest ended. There came a stir, a little broken sound, abrupt and choking, which tugged at his heart more than words.

“Oh,” she sobbed, “where can I go next?” and dropped head upon arms, across the open volume.

As though a musket were shot off in the room, his chair had struck the floor. He circled the table and caught her up, in a gust that sent the candle-light reeling.

“Oh, what a wretched girl!” she cried, her voice stifled in his jacket.

All the inevitable drift of their summer, the whole multitude of their hidden motives, shone clear before and about them,—a wide, manifold peace in the tumult, like a field of daisies seen by lightning.