Part 60 (1/2)

”Then your life is all before you, to make of it what you will,” said he, placing his hand on her shoulder, as she stood with him in the dim hall. He opened the study door. The wood on the grate was blazing brightly. Ollie saw someone standing before it, bending slightly forward in the pose of expectation. He was tall and of familiar figure, and the firelight was playing in the tossed curls of his short, fair hair.

”In there,” said the judge, ”if you care to go.”

Ollie did not stir. Her feet felt rooted to the floor in the wonder and doubt of this strange occurrence.

”Ollie!” cried the man at the hearthstone, calling her name imploringly.

He came forward, holding out pleading hands.

She stood a moment, as if gathering herself to a resolution. A sob rose in her throat, and broke from her lips transformed into a trembling, sharp, glad cry. It was as if she had cast the clot of sorrow from her heart. Then she pa.s.sed into the room and met him.

Judge Maxwell closed the door.

CHAPTER XXIII

LEST I FORGET

Mrs. Newbolt was cutting splints for her new sun-bonnet out of a pasteboard box. She hitched her chair back a little farther into the shadow of the porch, for the impertinent sun was winking on her bright scissors, dazzling her eyes.

It was past the turn of the afternoon; a soft wind was moving with indolence among the tender leaves, sleepy from the scents of lilac and apple bloom which it had drunk on its way. And now it loitered under the eaves of the porch to mix honeysuckle with its stream of drowsy sweets, like a chemist of Araby the Blest preparing a perfume for the harem's pride.

There was the gleam of fresh paint on the walls of the old house. The steps of the porch had been renewed with strong timber, the rotting siding had been replaced. Mrs. Newbolt's chair no longer drew squeaks and groans from the floor of the porch as she rocked, swaying gently as her quick shears shaped the board. New flooring had been laid there, and painted a handsome gray; the falling trellis between gate and door had been plumbed and renewed.

New life was everywhere about the old place, yet its old charm was undisturbed, its old homeliness was unchanged. Comfort had come to dejection, tidiness had been restored to beauty. The windows of the old house now looked upon the highway boldly, owing the world nothing in the way of gla.s.s.

Where the sprawling rail fence had lain for nearly forty years, renewed piecemeal from time to time as it rotted away, its corners full of brambles, its stakes and riders overrun with poison-vine; where this brown, jointed structure had stretched, like a fossil worm, a great transformation had come. The rails were gone, the brambles were cleared away, and a neat white fence of pickets stretched in front of the house.

This was flanked on either hand by a high fence of woven wire, new to that country then, at once the wonder of the old inhabitants, the despair of prowling hogs and the bewilderment of hens. There was a gate now where the old gap had been; it swung shut behind one with an eager little spring, which startled agents and strangers with the sharpness of its click.

The shrubbery had been cleared of dead wood, and the underlying generations of withered honeysuckle vines which had spread under the green upon the old trellis, had been taken away. Freshness was there, the mark of an eager, vigorous hand. The matted blue gra.s.s which sodded the yard had been cut and trimmed to lines along the path. A great and happy change had come over the old place, so long under the shadow.

People stopped to admire it as they pa.s.sed.

”Well, well; it's the doin's of that boy, Joe Newbolt!” they said.

Mrs. Newbolt paused in her clipping of bonnet slats to make a menacing snip at a big white rooster which came picking around the steps. The fowl stretched his long neck and turned his bright eye up to his mistress with a slanting of the head.

”How did you git out of that pen, you old scalawag?” she demanded.

The rooster took a long and dignified step away from her, where he stood, with little appearance of alarm, turning his head, questioning her with his s.h.i.+ning eye. She made a little lunge with her shears.

”Yes, I'm goin' to tell Joe on you, you scamp!” she threatened.

”_Coo-doot-cut!_” said the rooster, looking about him with a long stretching of the neck.

”Yes, you better begin to cackle over it,” said she, speaking in solemn reproof, as if addressing a child, ”for Joe he'll just about cut your sa.s.sy old head clean off! If he don't do that, he'll trim down that wing of yourn till you can't bat a skeeter off your nose with it, you red.i.c.k-lous old critter!”

But it was not the threat of Joe that had drawn the cry of alarm from the fowl. The sound of steps was growing along the path from the front gate, and the fowl scampered off to the cover of the gooseberry vines, as Mrs. Newbolt turned to see who the visitor was. The scissors fell from her lap, and her spool trundled off across the porch.

”Laws, Sol Greening, you give me a start, sneakin' up like that!”