The Lovely Lady | Page 3

had a dragon of his own to fight. Its name
was Mortgage. It had its lair in Lawyer Keplinger's office, from which
it threatened twice yearly to come out and eat up his mother and Ellen

and the little house and farm, and required to have its mouth stopped
with great wads of interest which took all Peter's laborious days to
scrape together. This year, however, he had hopes, if the garden turned
out well, of lopping off a limb or a claw of the dragon by way of a
payment on the principal, which somehow seemed to bring the Princess
so much nearer, that as Peter lay quite comfortably staring up at the
glimmer on the wall, the four gold lines of the frame began to stretch
up and out and the dark block of the picture to recede until it became
the great hall of a palace again, and there was the Princess coming
toward him in a golden shimmer.
There was just such another glow on the afternoon when Peter walked
over to the berrying and came up with the apple-cheeked girl whose
name was Ada, a good half mile from the others. As they climbed
together over uneven ground she gave him her hand to hold, and there
was very little to say and no need of saying it until they came to the hill
overlooking the pasture, yellowing toward the end of summer, full of
late bloom and misty colour passing insensibly into light. Threads of
gossamer caught on the ends of the scrub or floated free, glinting as
they turned and bellied in the windless air, to trick the imagination with
the hint of robed, invisible presences.
"Oh, Peter, don't you wish it would stay like this always?"
"Like this," Peter gave her hand the tiniest squeeze to show what there
was about this that he would like to keep. "It's just as good to look at
any season though," he insisted. "I was here hunting rabbits last winter,
in February, and you could find all sorts of things in the runways where
the brambles bent over and kept off the snow; bunches of berries and
coloured leaves, and little green fern, and birds hopping in and out."
Ada spread her skirts as she sat on a flat boulder and began sticking
leaves into Peter's hat.
"Peter, what are you going to do this winter?"
"I don't know, I should like to go over to the high school at Harmony,
but I suppose I'll try to get a place to work near home."

"We've been getting up a dancing and singing school, to begin in
October. The teacher is coming from Dassonville. It will be once a
week; we sing for an hour and then have dancing. It will be cheap as
cheap--only two dollars a month. I hope you can come."
"I don't know; I'll think about it." He was thinking then that two dollars
did not sound much, but when you come to subtract it from the interest
it was a great deal, and then there would be Ellen to pay for, and
perhaps a dress for her, and dancing shoes for himself and singing
books. And no doubt at the dances there would be basket suppers.
"I should think you could come if you wanted to. Jim Harvey's getting
it up.... He wants to keep company with me this winter." Ada was a
little nervous about this, but as she stole a glance at Peter's face as he
lay biting at a stem of grass, she grew quite comfortable again. "But I
don't know as I will," she said. "I don't care very much for Jim
Harvey."
Peter picked up a stone and shied it joyously at a thrush in the bushes.
"And I don't know as I want you to," he declared boldly. "I'll come to
that dancing school if I possibly can, Ada, and if I can't you'll know it
isn't because I don't wish to."
"You must want to with all your might and that'll make it come true.
You can wish it on my amethyst ring."
"You won't take it off until October, Ada?"
"I truly won't." And it took Peter such a long time to get the ring on and
held in place while the wish was properly made, that it was practically
no time at all until the others found them on the way home as they
came laughing up the hill.
As it happened, however, Peter did not get to the dancing school once
that winter. The first of the cold spell Ellen had slipped on the ice, to
the further trying of her lame back, and there were things to be done to
it which the doctor said could not possibly be put off, so