第60章

Uncle Eb and David were away buying cattle, half the week, but Elizabeth Brower was always at home to look after my comfort.

She was up betimes in the morning and singing at her work long before I was out of bed. when the breakfast was near ready she came to my door with a call so fall of cheerfulness and good-nature it was the best thing in the day. And often, at night, I have known her to come into my room when I was lying awake with some hard problem, to see that I was properly covered or that my window was not open too far. As we sat alone together, of an evening, I have seen her listen for hours while I was committing the Odes of Horace with a curiosity that finally gave way to resignation. Sometimes she would look over my shoulder at the printed page and try to discern some meaning in it when Uncle Eb was with us he would often sit a long time his head turned attentively as the lines came rattling off my tongue.

'Cur'us talk!' he said, one evening, as I paused a moment, while he crossed the room for a drink of water. 'Don' seem t' make no kind O' sense. I can make out a word here 'n there but fer good, sound, common sense I call it a purtythin crop.'

Hope wrote me every week for a time. A church choir had offered her a place soon after she went to the big city. She came home intending to surprise us all, the first summer but unfortunately, I had gone away in the woods with a party of surveyors and missed her. We were a month in the wilderness and came out a little west of Albany where I took a boat for New York to see Hope. I came down the North River between the great smoky cities, on either side of it, one damp and chilly morning. The noise, the crowds, the immensity of the town appalled me. At John Fuller's I found that Hope had gone home and while they tried to detain me longer I came back on the night boat of the same day. Hope and I passed each other in that journey and I did not see her until the summer preceding my third and last year in college - the faculty having allowed me to take two years in one. Her letters had come less frequently and when she came I saw a grand young lady of fine manners, her beauty shaping to an ampler mould, her form straightening to the dignity of womanhood.

At the depot our hands were cold and trembling with excitement - neither of us, I fancy, knowing quite how far to go in our greeting.

Our correspondence had been true to the promise made her mother - there had not been a word of love in it - only now and then a suggestion of our tender feeling. We hesitated only for the briefest moment. Then I put my arm about her neck and kissed her.

'I am so glad to see you,' she said.