Bylow Hill | Page 8

more sweetly and with more oh's and ho's than ever; for Isabel sedately
kissed Arthur's brother.
Ruth made signs to her father, who answered them in kind. "What does
she say, Mrs. Morris? Can you hear?"
"She says they're singing 'your hymn' down in a church under the hill."
"Ah yes." He beamed and nodded to Ruth; but when Mrs. Morris once
more laughed, his brow clouded a trifle. "Your daughter, Mrs.
Morris"--
The lady broke in with a note of bright surprise, rose, and took an
unconscious step forward. The five young friends were advancing in a
compact cluster, with measured pace. Ruth and Isabel, in front abreast,
and making happy show of the hawthorn sprays, were just enough apart
to conceal, except for their superior height, the three lovers, and in
lowered tones, but with kindling eyes, the five, incited by Ruth, were
singing the song they had caught up from the valley,--the old man's
favorite from the days of his own song-time. The General got himself
hurriedly to his feet; the shade passed from his brow. The group came
close; he stepped out, and Isabel, meeting him, laid her two hands in his,
while the halting cluster ceased their song suspensively on a line that
pledged loves and friendships too ethereal to clash.
"Isabel,"--he turned up a broadened palm,--"here's my amen to that line;
where's yours?"
With blushing alacrity she laid her hand on his.
"Arthur!" he called, and the lively lover added his to the two. "Now,
Ruth!"
"Father!" laughed the daughter, "isn't this rather youngish?" But she
laid her hand promptly upon Arthur's, and the lines of the General's
face deepened playfully, and Mrs. Morris's dimple did the same, as
Godfrey thrust his hand in upon Ruth's, unasked. The matron laughed
very tenderly on the key of O while she added her hand, and received
Leonard's heavy palm above it. Then Arthur clapped a second hand
upon Leonard's, and Leonard was about to lay a second quietly upon
Arthur's, when Isabel, rose-red from brow to throat, gayly broke the
heap and embraced Ruth.
"Well, honey-girlie," said Mrs. Morris, as she and Isabel reentered their
cottage, "wasn't it sweet of them all, that 'laying on of hands,' as Arthur

called it?"
"Yes," replied the Southern girl, starting up the cramped old New
England stairway to her room. "It was child's play, but it was very
sweet of them, and especially of the General."
The mother detained her fondly. "And still, my child, you're not
satisfied?"
"Ah, mother, are you blind, stone blind, or do you only hope I am?"
"My dearie!"
"Why, mother, excepting Leonard, we haven't had one word of true
consent from one of them."
"Oh, now, Isabel! They'll all be glad enough by and by."
"Yes," said the daughter, from the landing above, "I've no doubt of
that."
She passed into her room, closed the door, and standing in the middle
of the floor, with her temples in her palms, said, "O merciful God! Oh,
Leonard Byington, if only that second hand of yours had hung back!"

V
SKY AND POOL
Arthur and Isabel were married in their own little church of All Angels,
at the far end of the old street.
"I cal'late," said a rustic member of his vestry, "th' never was as pretty a
weddin' so simple, nor as simple a weddin' so pretty!"
Because he said it to Leonard Byington he ended with a manly laugh,
for by the anxious glance of his spectacled daughter he knew he had
slipped somewhere in his English. But when he heard Leonard and
Ruth, in greeting the bride's mother, jointly repeat the sentiment as their
own, he was, for a moment, nearly as happy as Mrs. Morris.
"Such a pity Godfrey had to be away!" said Mrs. Morris. It was the
only pity she chose to emphasize.
Godfrey was on distant seas. The north-bound mid-afternoon express
bore away the bridal pair for a week's absence.
"Too short," said a friend or so whom Leonard fell in with as he came
from the railway station, and Leonard admitted that Arthur was badly
in need of rest.
At sunset Ruth came out of her gate and stood to welcome her brother's
tardy return. Both brightly smiled; neither spoke.

When he gave her a letter with a foreign stamp her face lighted
gratefully, but still without words she put it under her belt. Then they
joined hands, and he asked, "Where's father?"
"Inside on the lounge," she replied. Her lips fell into their faraway
smile, to which she added this time a murmur as of reverie, and
Leonard said almost as musingly, "Come, take a short turn."
They moved on to the Winslow gate, and entered the garden by a path
which brought them to a