第59章

But three years had made a vast difference in Page Dearborn.All at once she was a young woman.Her straight, hard, little figure had developed, her arms were rounded, her eyes were calmer.She had grown taller, broader.Her former exquisite beauty was perhaps not quite so delicate, so fine, so virginal, so charmingly angular and boyish.There was infinitely more of the woman in it; and perhaps because of this she looked more like Laura than at any time of her life before.But even yet her expression was one of gravity, of seriousness.There was always a certain aloofness about Page.She looked out at the world solemnly, and as if separated from its lighter side.

Things humorous interested her only as inexplicable vagaries of the human animal.

"We heard the organ," said Laura, "so we came in.Iwanted Mrs.Gretry to listen to it."

The three years that had just passed had been the most important years of Laura Jadwin's life.Since her marriage she had grown intellectually and morally with amazing rapidity.Indeed, so swift had been the change, that it was not so much a growth as a transformation.She was no longer the same half-formed, impulsive girl who had found a delight in the addresses of her three lovers, and who had sat on the floor in the old home on State Street and allowed Landry Court to hold her hand.She looked back upon the Miss Dearborn of those days as though she were another person.How she had grown since then! How she had changed! How different, how infinitely more serious and sweet her life since then had become!

A great fact had entered her world, a great new element, that dwarfed all other thoughts, all other considerations.This was her love for her husband.It was as though until the time of her marriage she had walked in darkness, a darkness that she fancied was day; walked perversely, carelessly, and with a frivolity that was almost wicked.Then, suddenly, she had seen a great light.Love had entered her world.

In her new heaven a new light was fixed, and all other things were seen only because of this light; all other things were touched by it, tempered by it, warmed and vivified by it.

It had seemed to date from a certain evening at their country house at Geneva Lake in Wisconsin, where she had spent her honeymoon with her husband.They had been married about ten days.It was a July evening, and they were quite alone on board the little steam yacht the "Thetis." She remembered it all very plainly.

It had been so warm that she had not changed her dress after dinner--she recalled that it was of Honiton lace over old-rose silk, and that Curtis had said it was the prettiest he had ever seen.It was an hour before midnight, and the lake was so still as to appear veritably solid.The moon was reflected upon the surface with never a ripple to blur its image.The sky was grey with starlight, and only a vague bar of black between the star shimmer and the pale shield of the water marked the shore line.Never since that night could she hear the call of whip-poor-wills or the piping of night frogs that the scene did not come back to her.The little "Thetis" had throbbed and panted steadily.At the door of the engine room, the engineer--the grey MacKenny, his back discreetly turned--sat smoking a pipe and taking the air.From time to time he would swing himself into the engine room, and the clink and scrape of his shovel made itself heard as he stoked the fire vigorously.

Stretched out in a long wicker deck chair, hatless, a drab coat thrown around her shoulders, Laura had sat near her husband, who had placed himself upon a camp stool, where he could reach the wheel with one hand.

"Well," he had said at last, "are you glad you married me, Miss Dearborn?" And she had caught him about the neck and drawn his face down to hers, and her head thrown back, their lips all but touching, had whispered over and over again:

"I love you--love you--love you!"

That night was final.The marriage ceremony, even that moment in her room, when her husband had taken her in his arms and she had felt the first stirring of love in her heart, all the first week of their married life had been for Laura a whirl, a blur.She had not been able to find herself.Her affection for her husband came and went capriciously.There were moments when she believed herself to be really unhappy.Then, all at once, she seemed to awake.Not the ceremony at St.

James, Church, but that awakening had been her marriage.Now it was irrevocable; she was her husband's; she belonged to him indissolubly, forever and forever, and the surrender was a glory.Laura in that moment knew that love, the supreme triumph of a woman's life, was less a victory than a capitulation.

Since then her happiness had been perfect.Literally and truly there was not a cloud, not a mote in her sunshine.She had everything--the love of her husband, great wealth, extraordinary beauty, perfect health, an untroubled mind, friends, position--everything.God had been good to her, beyond all dreams and all deserving.For her had been reserved all the prizes, all the guerdons; for her who had done nothing to merit them.

Her husband she knew was no less happy.In those first three years after their marriage, life was one unending pageant; and their happiness became for them some marvellous, bewildering thing, dazzling, resplendent, a strange, glittering, jewelled Wonder-worker that suddenly had been put into their hands.