The Lost Road | Page 9

the
sun is setting crimson in the pools and the wind blows salt from the sea,
when he loses them both by moonlight in wood-roads where the hoofs
of the horses sink silently into dusty pine needles, he thinks more
frequently of the girl at his side than of the faithful troopers waiting for
him in San Francisco. The girl at his side thought frequently of him.

With the "surface indications" of a young man about to ask her to
marry him she was painfully familiar; but this time the possibility was
the reverse of painful. What she meant to do about it she did not know,
but she did know that she was strangely happy. Between living on as
the dependent of a somewhat exacting relative and becoming the full
partner of this young stranger, who with men had proved himself so
masterful, and who with her was so gentle, there seemed but little
choice. But she did not as yet wish to make the choice. She preferred to
believe she was not certain. She assured him that before his leave of
absence was over she would tell him whether she would remain on duty
with the querulous aunt, who had befriended her, or as his wife
accompany him to the Philippines.
It was not the answer he wanted; but in her happiness, which was
evident to every one, he could not help but take hope. And in the
questions she put to him of life in the tropics, of the life of the "officers'
ladies," he saw that what was in her mind was a possible life with him,
and he was content.
She became to him a wonderful, glorious person, and each day she
grew in loveliness. It had been five years of soldiering in Cuba, China,
and on the Mexican border since he had talked to a woman with interest,
and now in all she said, in all her thoughts and words and delights, he
found fresher and stronger reasons for discarding his determination to
remain wedded only to the United States Army. He did not need
reasons. He was far too much in love to see in any word or act of hers
anything that was not fine and beautiful.
In their rides they had one day stumbled upon a long-lost and
long-forgotten road through the woods, which she had claimed as their
own by right of discovery, and, no matter to what point they set forth
each day, they always returned by it. Their way through the woods
stretched for miles. It was concealed in a forest of stunted oaks and
black pines, with no sign of human habitation, save here and there a
clearing now long neglected and alive only with goldenrod. Trunks of
trees, moss-grown and crumbling beneath the touch of the ponies' hoofs,
lay in their path, and above it the branches of a younger generation had

clasped hands. At their approach squirrels raced for shelter, woodcock
and partridge shot deeper into the network of vines and saplings, and
the click of the steel as the ponies tossed their bits, and their own
whispers, alone disturbed the silence.
"It is an enchanted road," said the girl; "or maybe we are enchanted."
"Not I," cried the young man loyally. "I was never so sane, never so
sure, never so happy in knowing just what I wanted! If only you could
be as sure!"
One day she came to him in high excitement with a book of verse. "He
has written a poem," she cried, "about our own woods, about our lost
road! Listen" she commanded, and she read to him:
"'They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago. Weather
and rain have undone it again, And now you would never know There
was once a road through the woods Before they planted the trees. It is
underneath the coppice and heath, And the thin anemones. Only the
keeper sees That, where the ringdove broods, And the badgers roll at
ease, There was once a road through the woods.
"'Yet, if you enter the woods Of a summer evening late, When the night
air cools on the trout-ringed pools Where the otter whistles his mate
(They fear not men in the woods Because they see so few), You will
hear the beat of a horse's feet, And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through The misty solitudes, As though they
perfectly knew The old lost road through the woods. . . . But there is no
road through the woods.'"
"I don't like that at all," cried the soldierman. "It's too--too sad--it
doesn't give you any encouragement. The way it ends, I mean: 'But
there is no road through the woods.' Of course there's a road! For us
there