AT LAST

Stafford waited for the Far Away Lady in the morning—she was to come to breakfast at ten o'clock—and met her as she entered the Cassowary. They went into the dining car together, and, as they seated themselves, she noted the added buoyancy of his look and was prepared for anything. The breakfast ordered, he leaned back and asked complacently:

"What do you think of clocks?"

The Far Away Lady looked at him in mild amazement: "Are you not a trifle vague?" she asked. "Is not that like what I have heard you call too much of a 'general proposition'? How can I answer you when I do not know what you mean?"

"Oh, well, maybe it was only a sort of 'general proposition,' but it was in earnest. This, my dear, is an important subject. They have clocks in houses, do they not? Now, it so happens that I am mightily interested in a home and, so, am necessarily interested in clocks. This home is not yet made, but it is as sure as anything within man's mortal scope may be, and clocks are part of the general theme. My dear lady, help me out."

She looked upon him indulgently in his lunacy. She understood, as she had the day before, though now the understanding was simple, since she had the key to his mood. Besides, even in the exuberance of his feelings, he was apparently, not quite so royally driveling, as on the occasion of his first outbreak. Her look grew almost motherly as he checked himself suddenly and informed her that he was pinching his arm to be sure that everything was true.

"Yes," he continued, "there is a great deal to clocks. They are wonderfully cheering and companionable. Their ticking, after a little, never annoys you, and you somehow, come to really need it and to feel a loss when the clock is stopped. It is, in a way, like the sound of the cricket on the hearth. While it is ticking you feel as if you had something alive and friendly about you."

"I like clocks, too," said the Far Away Lady, smiling into his foolish face.

"I had two clocks in China," went on the beaming Stafford, "and I had them with me wherever I was stationed. The transportation of such things was a nuisance, but they paid their way. One was a pretty clock with a softly beaming face, who struck the hours with a delightful chime. The other was a little alarm clock, and he was noisy and tough. He was a profligate. He became confidential with me, but there was always a certain reservation. Our souls never got absolutely close together, but he was a bulwark and a brother. He was all there. The charming clock with the chime I called St. Cecelia, and the little tough clock I called Billy. Sweetheart, you can hardly imagine what a comfort the two were to me. Away off there in the gray wastes of a vast territory, an engineer solving his problems practically alone, longing occasionally for companionship and finding it not among the alien Russian assistants or among the flat-faced Celestial laborers—well, then I'd go in to St. Cecelia and Billy, and she would console softly and Billy would tick and swear with me in the most intimate companionship and understanding, and brace me up. Why, my girl, that clock was my right hand man and my adviser. I don't suppose he really advised, but he was somehow, always on deck. Billy and St. Cecelia are both in my baggage now."

"Billy appeals to me," said the lady. "Did he always awaken you?"

"No," admitted Stafford, "I was usually awakened by the racket of the coolies. Their clatter and chatter made them worse than sparrows. It wasn't Billy's utility as an alarm clock which endeared him, but a sort of personal affection which developed in me because he really deserved it. We were drawn together. St. Cecelia and I respected and admired each other, but Billy was such a flagrant fellow and whooped it up so when he struck that I got rather to lean upon him when I had anything approaching the blues. I had them, sometimes," said he more slowly and looking at her earnestly, "but Billy always sounded a note of reckless plunging ahead and hopefulness."

Here he stopped talking, apparently seized with a sudden inspiration. Then, after a moment, he went on in the most casual manner: "By the way, dear, why can't we have Billy in the kitchen of the Shack? His hands show clearly against his face and he'd be excessively good to boil eggs by."

The fair countenance of the woman became suffused and the depths of her eyes were suddenly peopled beyond all the vision of any fate-reader's crystal. All the nymphs of love and sweet regard were there. She, like him, had been dreaming much of the Shack since their parting of the night before, and the knowledge that he also had been thinking of it, was something wonderful to her. He, too, then had been having fancies about the Shack, the dream home by the side of the water, the vision of the past, the certainty, now, of the future. They would never abandon that idea. And now there came to her—she could see nothing else—the miserable scene of the years past, the shore and the blue lake waters and the man with bursting heart drawing a picture which was at the time indeed a fantasy, talking bravely, seeking to hide his own suffering and make hers less, to gloss over the hard aspect of the parting,—and failing miserably.

She reached her hand across and put it in that of Stafford:

"We will have Billy and St. Cecelia both," she whispered.

Now these were not young people in their 'teens nor in the early twenties, yet they said and did what is now being told of them. Is the gold of the world, are all its great passions and vast affection, but for the callow!

"There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four," saith the venerable and justly popular author of Proverbs, and he concludes and crowns the list with "the way of a man with a maid." He might have made the same comment regarding the way of a maid with a man, but either way is insignificant in comparison with the ways of an intelligent man and woman in the full flux and prime of life, and who have learned. There is a difference indescribable between youth and those who have come to the understanding comprehension of what is the greatest thing in the world. They own the consciousness of its magnitude, a knowledge which the others lack. Talk about love-making! Theirs is the unconscious, intense and honest art of the old masters.

He dawdled on in his day dream: "You know about the dogs, don't you?"—she nodded—"and we'll have chickens, of course, far from the house and garden, snow-white Leghorns, since they lay voraciously—'voracious' is the word—and eggs are the spice of life. There'll be other things to eat, too, and in sunny cleared places in the wood there will be the most voluptuous asparagus and strawberry beds in the world, and, as for the eye and nose, your own flower garden, near the Shack,—Have we not talked of it, somewhere, before?—what a garden that will be! I know it already, because I know your fancies. No park gardening there, but the natural beauty and abandon of nature with a friend at hand. I can shut my eyes and see the roses and the dahlias and the hollyhocks and the old-fashioned pinks and the lilacs and all the old flowers and shrubs and a host of the newer ones which have won a deserved place since Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, and there is in my nostrils a blending of perfumes that makes any mention of Araby the Blest seem puerile, while the desert that 'shall rejoice and blossom as the rose' will be but as a sand spit compared with our responsive but untamed estate.

"And," he continued, "there is a fad of my own which I have not yet mentioned. I am going to be a benefactor of mankind—I suppose it was in me and had to come out—and our jungle home will afford the opportunity for carrying out my beneficent designs. I am going to make a domestic bird of one of the most desirable of birds existent. I refer to the quail, the bird that whistles on country fences and doesn't on toast. I'm going to get a lot of them and treat them as if they were and had always been part of the family. They shall have a great wire-covered range and all conveniences of an outdoor home, and I'm going to keep on raising them and experimenting and trying until I have a really tame quail, one with atrophied wings and a trusting heart. That we'll do, dear, and coming generations shall rise up and call us blessed."

She looked upon him still indulgently. It was all concerning their life across the lake, and slight wonder was it that she was at one with him in his dreaming, he the man of action, the man with the sense of humor and perception of the grotesque, who always laughed at things,—that he should thus idle so happily in fancy with the Shack and its surroundings, well, she felt in its fullness love's compliment to her. She knew the keynote of it all and but encouraged him with speaking eyes. He was looking out of the window now but he turned to her in a moment:

"It seems to me," he said, "that we are already getting a little of the flavor of our own country. I'll be imagining the Pines of Saginaw next. Look out upon that expanse of snow."—The train was tearing down through the Des Moines valley now—"That is snow, real snow, no tremendous, swirling, threatening drifts, no dead expanse with bare, bleak spots, but instead, a great soft mantle, protecting the germs of the coming crops and the ally, not the enemy of man. How white it is, as it has a right to be. It means well. It is cold, but it is second cousin to the seeds and to our own kind of spring. It is well connected."

There was something to the lover's dreams and vaporings. The quality of earth and air was changing imperceptibly but surely. The spirit of the Lake Region was abroad and had wandered even into Iowa.

The shadows of the telegraph poles, slanting eastward, became longer and longer. Stafford, abandoning reluctantly his pictures of the future when the two should be together, laughed quietly:

"Will you always be so patient?" he asked.

She laughed as well: "I'm afraid, big boy, that there does not live a wise woman who cares who would not be always patient listening when the theme was such and the object such. Did I not say that ponderously and nicely?" she added. And he but laughed again.

They made their way to the Cassowary, for there were many hand-shakings and genial partings in progress there and the two were, necessarily, a part of the scene. More than one lasting friendship had been formed in the luxurious Cassowary.

Evening was near. Already the Pillar of Cloud by day looming above the shore of the great lake was plainly visible. The slower way through the city was made, the train came to a stand-still and upon the ears of its inmates broke all the varied station sounds, the calls of starters, the clangor of engine bells, the trucks and the shouting of cabmen outside.

Stafford assisted the Far Away Lady—the Far Away Lady no longer—to alight from the platform:

"The harshness is over," he said. "We will never part again."

"Never," she said, and then, "It has been a long time."

She had brightened her grey traveling dress with a rose-colored ribbon at her throat, and her cheeks were rose-colored, too.

"I would have come sooner, had I known," said the man.

And they went out into the world together.

THE END