The next day, when Vance got out of the train at Paul’s Landing, the old horses in the broken-down carry-alls were still standing in the station square, shaking their heads despondently.
He jumped on board a passing trolley and was carried out of the town. At the foot of a familiar lane overhung by bare maple boughs he got out and began to climb to the Willows. Laura Lou had said she would bring the key of the gate with her. She couldn’t let him into the house, she explained: since the theft of the books (which had been brought back, as she supposed Vance knew) Mrs. Tracy had kept the house key hidden away where no one could get it. But Vance was determined at least to see the garden and the outside of the house again, and the day was so windless and mild that they would be able to sit in the sun on the verandah. He wanted to relive his first visit to the Willows, when he had accompanied Laura Lou and Upton, and had lingered spellbound in the library while Laura Lou, her hair covered with a towel, went off with Upton to dust and air the rooms. That day Vance had hardly noticed her, had felt her presence only as that of a tiresome schoolgirl, butting in where she wasn’t wanted, like his own sisters, Pearl and Mae — especially Pearl. And now —!
She was at the gate already; he caught sight of her through the branches, in the powdery gold of the autumn light. She waved to him, and opened the gate; and he followed her in. “No, you mustn’t!” she whispered, as his arms went out, and added, laughing: “With all the leaves off the bushes — and that hired man around.”
“Curse the hired man! Can’t we go and talk quietly somewhere?”
He was looking at her as though to store up the sight against a coming separation, and yet he knew already that he never meant to leave her again. “Can’t I hold your hand, at least?” he asked, awed by something so tender and immature in her that it curbed his impetuousness.
“Oh, well — ” she conceded; and hand in hand, like two children, they began to walk toward the house. Barely screened by its tracery of leafless willows it stood out more prominent and turreted than he had remembered; but if less romantic, it still seemed to him as mysterious. Treading noiselessly on the rain~flattened yellowish grass they passed around to the other front, where the projecting verandah and obliquely set balconies, clutched in the bare gnarled arms of the wistaria, stood out like the torso of an old Laoco?n.
A few oaks still held their foliage, and the evergreen clumps stood out blue-black and solid. But the fall of the leaves revealed, at the end of a path, a rickety trellised arbour which Vance had never before noticed. “Let’s go and sit there.” They crossed the wet cobwebby lawn and entered the arbour. The old hired man was nowhere to be seen, and Vance drew Laura Lou to him and laid his lips on her eyelids. “Ever since yesterday I’ve wanted to kiss your eyes.” She laughed under her breath, and they sat close to each other on the mouldy bench.
“You never used to take any notice of me in old times,” she said; and he answered: “I was nothing but a blind puppy then. Puppies are all born blind . . . .” He wanted to let his kiss glide down to her lips, but she put him from her. The gentleness of her touch controlled him; but he whispered rebelliously: “Why — why?”
She answered that all she had promised was to come and talk things over with him, and he mustn’t tease, or she’d have to go away; and why couldn’t they just sit there quietly, when there was so much to say and so little time? He hardly heard what she said, but there was a power in her softness — or in her beauty, perhaps — which held him subdued. “Your hand, then —?” “Yes.” She gave it back, with one of those smiles which made her mouth like the inside of a flower. Oh, idle metaphors! . . .
“Now tell me.” And she told him how upset her mother had been when he went away so suddenly (“She never meant you to, Vance — but she got frightened . . . .”), and how surprised they were when the basket of flowers with the dove was brought the next day, and how Mrs. Tracy had first been angry, and said: “Is he crazy?” and then cried, and said: “But he must have spent all the money I gave him back,” and then been angry again because she was so sure he’d be the cause of their losing their job at the Willows — and they did lose it, and only got it back after Miss Halo had intervened, and the books were returned, and old Mr. Lorburn had been quieted down again. (“But the dove was lovely, Vance. I’ve got it over my looking glass . . . .”) And at the thought of this miraculous reward he had to clench her hand hard to keep himself from warmer endearments. How little he had dreamed, when he bought it, that the dove would be Venus’s messenger!
She went on to say that things had been very hard for a time, because they had been out of their job for six months. It wasn’t so much the money, though they needed that too; he gathered that Mrs. Tracy’s pride had been wounded, and that she had declared, when Miss Halo tried to fix it up, that it was no use, as she would never let her children go back to the Willows if they had forfeited their cousin’s confidence. But Miss Halo always somehow managed to put things right, and had finally persuaded Mrs. Tracy to relent; and she had continued to help them after that, and had found a fine situation for Upton as undergardener with some friends of hers who had a big place at Tarrytown. So everything was going better now; and she, Laura Lou, was at Saint Elfrida’s School, at Peapack, for a six months’ course, to learn French and literature and a little music — because her mother wanted her to be educated, like her father’s folks were . . . .
Laura Lou was not endowed with the narrative gift; only bit by bit, in answer to Vance’s questions (when he was not too absorbed in her to put any) did she manage, in fragmentary communications, to bridge over the interval which had turned the gawky girl into the miracle of young womanhood before him.
When she wanted to hear what had happened to him since they had parted he found it even harder to tell his story than to piece hers together. While she talked he could spin about her a silken cocoon of revery, made out of her soft drawl, the throb of her hand, the fruitlike curve of her cheeks and eyelids; but when he tried to withdraw his attention from her long enough to put his words in order he lost himself in a blur. . . . Really, he said, nothing much had happened to him, nothing that he specially remembered. He’d been a reporter in the principal Euphoria newspaper, and hated it; and he had taken a post-graduate course in philosophy and literature at the state college; but the lecturers somehow didn’t get hold of him. Reading in a library was what suited him, he guessed. (Her lashes were planted like the double row of microscopic hummingbird feathers in a South American embroidery he’d seen somewhere . . . .) But Euphoria was over and done with; he’d got a job in New York . . . a job on a swell magazine, a literary review they called it, b............