LITMIR.BIZ

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      She was in a little heaven, made up of the most ingenuous aspirations, the innocence of which seemed to her a guarantee of their certain fulfillment. Her fervent desire to be good was equal to and of the same quality as her desire to be a successful débutante. It would make her family so happy to have her both. These somewhat widely diverging aims were all a part of the current of her life, the impulse to be what those she loved would like to have her. It was not that she was willing to give up her own individuality to gratify the impulse, but rather that she did not for an instant conceive of the necessity for such a sacrifice. It was part of her immense happiness that she had always loved to be what it pleased everyone to have her, and that, apparently, people wished to have her only what she wished to be. She was like a child guarded by her elders from any knowledge of forbidden food. All the goodies of which she had ever heard were hers for the asking. In such a carefully arranged nursery it would be perversity to doubt the everlasting quality of the coincidence between one’s desires and one’s obedience. It was no more remarkable a coincidence than that both dew and sunshine were good for the grass over which she now ran lightly to another corner of the grounds about her parents’ house. Here, just outside the circle of deep shade cast by an exuberantly leaved maple, she stood for a moment, her hands full of grapes, her eyes wandering about the green, well-kept double acres called diversely in the family “the grounds” (Mrs. Emery’s name) and “the yard.” Lydia always clung to her father’s name; she had very little inborn feeling for the finer shades of her mother’s vocabulary. Mrs. Emery rejoiced in the careless unconsciousness of the importance of such details, but she felt that Lydia should be cautioned against going too far. It was one of the girl’s odd ways to be fond of the few phrases left over in the Emery dictionary from their simpler earlier days. She always called the two servants “the girls” or “the help” instead of “the maids,” spoke of the “washwoman” instead of the “laundress,” and, as did her father, called the man who took care of the grounds, ran the furnace, and drove the Emery’s comfortable surrey, the “hired man” instead of the “gardener” or the “coachman,” or, in Mrs. Emery’s elegantly indefinite phrase, “our man.”

      Lydia explained this whimsical reaction rather incoherently by saying that those nice old words were so much more fun than the others, and in spite of remonstrance she clung to her fancy with so lightly laughing an obstinacy that neither she nor anyone suspected it of being a surface indication of a significant tendency.

      She had occasionally other droll little ways of differing from the family, which were called indulgently “Lydia’s notions.” Her mother would certainly have thus named this flight out into the early morning. She would have found extravagant, and a little disconcerting, the completeness of Lydia’s content in so simple a thing as standing in the first sunshine of an early morning in September, and she would have been unquestionably disturbed, perhaps even a little alarmed, by the beatific expression of Lydia’s face as she gazed fixedly up into the sky, the tempered radiance of which was as yet not too bright for her clear gaze.

      All the restless joy of a few minutes before, which had driven her about from one delight to another, fused under the sun’s first warmth into a trance-like quiet. She stood still in the sunshine, a slow flush, like a reflection of dawn, rising to her cheeks, her lips parted, her eyes bright and vacant. An old person coming upon her at this moment would have been painfully moved by that tragic pity which age feels for the unreasoning joy of youth. She looked a child, open-eyed and breathless before the fleeting beauties of a bubble, most iridescent when about to disappear.

      It was a man by no means old who swung suddenly into sight around the corner, walking swiftly and noiselessly upon the close-cut grass, and the startled expression with which he found himself close to Lydia was by no means one of pity. He fell back a step, and in the instant before the girl was aware of his presence his gaze upon her was that of a man dazzled by an incredible vision.

      She brought her eyes down to him, and for the space of a breath the expression was hers as well. The sunlight glowing about them seemed the reflection of their faces. Then, for a moment longer, though mutual recognition flashed into their eyes, they did not speak, looking at each other long and seriously.

      Finally, with a nymph-like stir of all her slender body, Lydia roused herself. “Well, I can speak—can you?” she asked whimsically. “Don’t you remember me?”

      The man drew a long breath and took off his cap, showing close-cropped auburn hair gleaming, like his beard, red in the sun. “You took my breath away!” he exclaimed.

      “What was the matter with me?” asked Lydia, prettily confident of a compliment to follow.

      It came in so much less direct a form than she had expected that before she recognized it she had returned it with naïve impulsiveness.

      “I didn’t think you could be real,” said the man, “you looked so exactly the way this glorious morning made me feel.”

      “Why, that’s just how you looked to me!” she cried, and flushed at the significance of her words.

      Before her confusion the other turned away his quiet gray eyes, and said lightly, “Well, that’s because we are the only people in all the world with sense enough to get up so early on a morning like this. I’ve been out tramping since dawn.”

      Lydia explained herself also. “I just couldn’t sleep, it seemed so lovely. It’s my first morning home, you know.”

      “Is it?” responded the man, with a vagueness he made no effort to conceal.

      It came over Lydia with a shock that he did not know she had been away. She felt hurt. It seemed ungracious for anyone in Endbury not to have missed her, not to share in the joyful excitement of her final return. “I’ve been in Europe for a year,” she told him, with a dignity that was a reproach.

      “Oh, yes, yes; I remember now hearing Dr. Melton speak of it,” he answered, with no shade of apology for his forgetfulness. He looked at her speculatively, as if wondering what note to strike for the continuation of their talk. Apparently he decided on the note of lightness. “Well, you’re the most important person there is for me to-day,” he told her unexpectedly.

      Lydia arched her dark eyebrows inquiringly. She was always sensitively responsive, and now had forgotten, like a sweet-tempered child, her momentary pique.

      He smiled suddenly, moved, as people often were, to an apparently irrelevant tenderness for her. His voice softened into a playfulness like that of a person speaking to an imaginative little girl. “Why, didn’t you learn in school that all wise old nations have the belief that the first person you meet after you go out in the morning decides the fortune of the day for you? Now, what kind of a day are you going to give me?”

      Lydia laughed. “Oh, you must tell first! You forget you’re the first person I’ve seen this morning. I’ll see what I can do for you after I’ve seen what you are going to do for me.” She added, with a solemnity only half jocular, “But it’s ever so much more important in my case, for you’re the first person I meet as I begin my life in Endbury. Think what a responsibility for you! You ought to give me something extra nice beside, for not remembering me any better and never noticing that I had been away.” She broke into a sunny mitigation of her own severity, “But you can have some grapes, even if you are not very flattering.”

      The man took the cluster she held out to him, but only eyed them as he answered, “Oh, I remember you very well. You’re a niece of Mrs. Sandworth’s, or of her husband’s, and Mrs. Sandworth is Dr. Melton’s sister. You’re the big-eyed little girl who used to sit in a corner and sew while the doctor and I talked, and now,” he brought it out rotundly, “you’ve been to Europe for a year, and you’re grown-up.”

      Lydia hung her head laughingly at his good-natured caricature. “Well, but I have, really and truly,” she protested, “all of that. And I just guess you haven’t had two such interesting things happen to you in such a short time as—” She stopped short, struck dumb by a sudden recollection. “Oh, I beg your pardon,” she murmured; “I forgot about what they said you had—”

      Her expression

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