Lydia of the Pines Part 68

Willis turned white, and laid down his salad fork. Lydia turned her head away, then looked back, her eyes a little tear dimmed.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Don't be," he answered, after a moment. "You never did a kinder thing than to tell me this now--before--not but what it would have been too late, had you told me two years ago."

"Oh, I am so sorry," repeated Lydia miserably.

"But you mustn't be! Besides, you and I are both scholars and scholars are always philosophers!"

He was silent for the rest of the banquet, in spite of his philosophy.

But when he was called on for his toast, which was the last one, he rose coolly enough, and began steadily,

"My toast is to all scholars, everywhere, but also to one scholar in particular. It is to one who was born with a love of books, to one who made books--good books--so intimate a part of her life that she made poverty a blessing, who combined books and living so deeply that she read her community aright, when others failed to do so, to one who is a scholar in the truest sense of the word--a book lover with a vision. I drink to the youngest and sweetest scholar of us all!" and he bowed to Lydia.

How she got through the congratulations and out to Billy, patiently waiting at the main campus gate, Lydia was not sure, for she was quite drunk with surprise and pleasure. After she had told it all to Billy, and once more they were standing under the pine at the gate, she said,

"Billy, will you go up with Father and Lizzie and me to open up the three hundred and twenty acres?"

Billy answered slowly. "There's nothing I'd like better. I was born to be a farmer. But, Lydia, it looks to me as if, as a lawyer, I'd be a more useful citizen, the way things are now in the country."

Lydia shook her head. "We've got too many lawyers in America. What I think America needs is real love of America. And it seems to me the best way to get it is to identify oneself with the actual soil of the community. What I want is this. That you and I, upon the ground where poor John Levine did such wrongs, build us a home. I don't mean a home as Americans usually mean the word. I mean we'll try to found a family there. We'll send the roots of our roof tree so deep into the ground that for generations to come our children's children will be found there and our family name will stand for old American ideals in the community. I don't see how else we Americans can make up to the world for the way we've exploited America."

Billy stood with his arm about the slender "scholar." Suddenly there flooded in upon him the old, old call, the call that had brought his Pilgrim forefathers across the Atlantic, the call that was as old as the yearning for freedom of the soil.

"Lord!" he cried, "how glad I'll be to go up there! Think of beginning our life together with such a dream!"

"I believe John Levine would be glad, if he knew," said Lydia, wistfully.

"I know he'd be glad. . . . Lydia, do you love me, dear?"

"Love you! Oh, more than all the world! You know it, don't you?"

"I know it, but I can't believe it." His arm tightened around Lydia and as on just such an evening, four years before, he said,

"What a wonderful night!"

A wonderful night, indeed! Sound and scent of bursting summer.

Syringas coming as lilacs went. The lake, lap-lapping on the sh.o.r.e.

The lazy croak of frogs and the moon sinking low over the cottage.

Above them the pine, murmuring as of old. Life and the year at the full. A wonderful night, indeed!