The All-Story, March 1914 — page 142: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE SMOLDERING PAST. How glad the men were to resume regular work only Paul and themselves knew. Up and down the King’s Road from Swallow Tail Light to Castalia there was scarcely a man but was heavily in debt to Bill Boughton for his winter supplies—debt that must be paid of during the summer to insure credit for the following cold season. - Sundays were Paul's and Betty's days of bliss. All morning, with ruler, tard pencil, and rough paper tacked out gma bread board, he wrestled with his iovention, endeavoring to eliminate the unnecessary and impracticable, and till tn retain the big, simple, central idea. During these hours Betty, flushed and warm, but singing, helped Mis’ Shannon prepare the piéce de resistance of the week—the Sunday dinner. When this had been disposed of by the few boarders and themselves, Paul would help with the dishes, so that usually the time between half past two and five was ther own—and this was the crowning pleasure of the week. - Then Betty, in a stiff, starched dress, with coat for the cool of the day, and he in a ready-made blue suit with a book in his pocket would start away together toward their secret retreat in the wood’s heart. Swallows and meadow-larks sang erywhere and, distilled by the hot sun, the odor of balsam floated on the salt breeze. From a big, dead stump, the highest point in their glade, they could lok down on the village, its ugliness blurred by distance. They could see far out across slate-blue Fundy, and could watch the pallid, changing fog-banks that hovered in Whale Cove or among the islands stringing south, On one glorious Sunday in particular nature and circumstances seemed to have combined for their delight. “Hotel-ly”’ speaking, it was at that period in May between the departure of the last spring drummers and the arrivals of the first summer boarders. For the first time in months Mis’ Shan- fon’s was etnpty of guests. 615 The widow, unaccountably pleased, hired a horse and buggy to visit some, of her late husband’s kinsmen in Grand Harbor, and announced that there would be no supper for Betty to get other than Paul’s and her own. The two did not read much that day. Sitting on the soft, pine floor of their nook, their backs against mossy tree- trunks, the sun warm upon them, they talked intermittently as the spirit moved, random, murmured sentences of quiet content and rapture. Beauty was all about them — pun- gent, fresh beauty of mounting vitality. The banded silver birches that sen- tineled their retreat gleamed with new whiteness against the forest glooms be- yond. The sun glinted on the polished ereen needles of pine and hemlock, and wooed from the warm earth a fallow fragrance. Birds flew back and forth to invisi- ble nests carrying delectable morsels. Every living thing, impelled by that glad instinct which, in its highest ex- pression is aspiration and poetry, la- bored grandly in the work of recreation. Through avenues of the senses whose courses are indefinable the realization of all this came to Paul and Betty. The subdued instincts of a million years of development called to them. Sleeping dreams and desires awoke as the pool of yearning hfe was invisibly stirred, and a slow languor seized them. The spring tide of emotion in both was straining against the dikes of con- trol the past had so laboriously built. Silence fell between them, the silence of self-consciousness. Each gazing into the magic crystal of nature saw the inmost thoughts of the other mirrored there. Then, as our parents of old, after the Garden, became aware of their physical nudity, so these two looked upon each other with eyes that saw, and behold, their souls were naked! Fach busy with his own revelations they sat long, and it was darkening when they stumbled down the twisting, rocky path to the King's Road. silent.