From where Hennion sat he could look past the porch pillar, to the spot at the street corner directly under the electric light. The street was deserted except for some solitary walker, pacing the sidewalk slowly past the house, and hidden from Hennion by the porch vines. Now he had turned and was coming back again slowly to the corner, and now Hennion glanced out beyond the pillar and saw Aidee standing under the electric light. Then Aidee was again hidden by the porch vines, and again his slow footsteps passed on the sidewalk some hundreds of feet from the porch.
"Can I cross it?" Camilla's voice sounded older, not buoyant, but tired and humble, and sinking lower and lower as she went on. "Can I? If love were the same as faith! There's no one else I can believe in, in this way, as I do in you, dear. I'm so sure, but I thought--but can I come? If you tell me truly that I can come--I will believe what you tell me."
Hennion wondered if Aidee had come to take his last look at the house, or were debating in his mind whether or not he should enter. He turned on Camilla, and thrust his arm beneath her, and drew her to him sharply. He expected a remonstrance, but none came; only a small sigh whose meaning was as imponderable as the scent of the little white flowers that grew on the porch vines; and her hand lay still on one of his shoulders, and her head with its thick hair on the other.
Another small sigh, a moment's weighing of the statement.
Aidee passed under the electric light once more, and looked his last on the Champney windows, unnoticed now from the Champney porch, unaware that there was anyone to notice him in the shadow of the deep porch vines, with their small white glimmering blossoms. He quickened his pace and went his way up Bank Street.
|HENNION and Camilla were married in the fall when the maple leaves were turning yellow and red. It may be that Camilla thought of herself as one consenting with humility to enter a quiet gateway, the shelter of a garden whose walks and borders she knew; and it may be that she was mistaken and found it a strange garden with many an herb of grace, and many an old-fashioned perennial as fairly embroidered as any that grow in Arcadia; for when one has found that the birth of one of the common flowers and hardy perennials comes as wonderfully out of the deeps as the birth of a new day, it may be that one understands heaven even better than when floating in Arcadia among its morning islands.