Round Anvil Rock | Page 3

of
poetry that was in him thrilling in response, he felt that the prayers then
going up must fill the cruel wilderness with holy incense; that the
coming of these gentle Sisters must subdue the very wild beasts, as the
presence of the lovely martyrs subdued the lions of old.
"Ah, David! David!" cried a gay young voice behind him. "Dreaming
again--with your eyes wide open. And seeing visions, too, no doubt."
He turned with a guilty start and looked up at Ruth. She was standing
near by but higher on the river bank, and her slender white form was
half concealed by the drooping foliage of a young willow tree. There
was something about Ruth herself that always made him think of a
young willow with every graceful wand in bloom. And now--as nearly
always--there was a flutter of soft whiteness about her, for the day was
as warm as mid-summer. He could not have told what it was that she
wore, but her fluttering white garments might have been woven of the
mists training over the hills, so ethereal they looked, seen through the
golden green of the delicate willow leaves that were still gilded by the
afterglow which had vanished from the shadowed river. Her smiling
face could not have been more radiant had the sunlight shone full upon
it. The dusk of evening seemed always lingering under the long curling

lashes that made her blue eyes so dark, and her hair was as black at
midday as at midnight. So that now--when she shook her head at the
boy--a wonderful long, thick, silky lock escaped its fastenings, and the
wind caught it and spun it like silk into the finest blue-black floss.
"Yes, sir, you've been dreaming again! You needn't pretend you were
thinking--you don't know how to think. Thinking is not romantic
enough. I have been here watching you for a long time, and I know just
how romantic the dreams are that you have been dreaming. I could tell
by the way you turned,--this way and that,--looking up and down the
river. It always bewitches you when the sun goes and the shadows
come. I knew I should find you here, just like this; and I came on
purpose to wake and scold you."
She pretended to draw her pretty brow into a frown, but she could not
help smiling.
"Seriously, dear, you must stop dreaming. It is a dreadful thing to be a
dreamer in a new country. State makers should all be wide-awake
workers. You are out of place here; as Uncle Philip Alston says--"
"Then why did he put me here?" the boy burst out bitterly.
"David!" she cried in wounded reproach, "how can you? It hurts me to
hear you say things like that. I can't bear to hear any one say anything
against him--I love him so. And from you--who owe him almost as
much as I do--"
The tears were very near. But she was a little angry, too, and her blue
eyes flashed.
"No; no one owes him so much--as myself. He couldn't have been so
good--no one ever could be so good to any one else as he has always
been to me. Still"--softening suddenly, for she was fond of the boy, and
something in his sensitive face went to her tender heart--"think, David,
dear, we owe him everything we have,--our names, our home, our
clothes, our education, our very lives. We must never for a moment
forget that it was he who found us all alone--you in a cabin on the

Wilderness Road and me in a boat at Duff's Fort--and brought us in his
own arms to Cedar House. And you know as well as I do that he would
have given us a home in his own house if it had not been so rough and
bare a place, a mere camp. And then there was no woman in it to take
care of us, and we were only little mites of babies--poor, crying,
helpless morsels of humanity. Where do you think we came from,
David? I wonder and wonder and wonder!" wistfully, with her gaze on
the darkening river.
It was an old question, and one that they had been asking themselves
and one another and every one, over and over, ever since they had been
old enough to think. The short story which Philip Alston had told was
all that he or any one knew or ever was to know. The boy silently
shook his head. The girl went on:--
"Sometimes I am sorry that we couldn't live in his house. You would
have understood him better and have loved him more--as he deserves.
It is only that you don't really know each other," she said gently. "And
then I should like to