Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 220, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 September 1916 — The IDYL of TWIN FIRES by WALTER PRICHARD EATON [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The IDYL of TWIN FIRES by WALTER PRICHARD EATON

BYNOPBI9. —7— I rrow tired of my work u » college Instructor and* buy a New England farm An «leht. I lnapect my farm and go to board at Bert Temple’s. Bert helps im to blre- a carpenter and a farmer. Ha Erft?ee PIOW Ha g rd '<&? ISSTiround the twin fireplace*. Mrs. assswsr a°ffi rtf n. new boarder from New YorK, a nan •ick young woman who needs the country Sir. 7 I discover that Stella Goodwin wllII make a delightful companion and believe she ought not to return to the hot and dusty city for a long time.

~ Barring the love-at-first-sight theory, do you believe a man and woman of Intelligence and self-restraint know whon the beginning aymptoms of love for one another come? Is It simply the blossoming of friendship or is it the awakening of desire—both spiritual and physlcatflasire?

CHAPTER Vl—Continued.

“He will sing tomorrow,” said I. Her eyes twinkled once more. ‘‘Perhaps be has that terrible disease, ‘sudden indisposition,’" she laughed. “Come, we must go home to supper. It will take me hours to get clean.” Out In the open, she looked at her hands. “See, I’ve begun to get calluses, too!” she exclaimed, holding out her palms proudly. “You’ve got blisters,” said I. “No work for you tomorrow! Let me see. I touched her hand, as we paused beneath a blossoming apple tree, with the fragrance shedding about us. Our eyes met, too, as I did so. She drew her hand back gently, as the color came to her cheeks. We walked on in silence, as far as the pump. Mike had finished milking, and had gone home. The «table was closed. Inside we could hear the animals stamp. Suddenly I put , my head under the pump spout, and asked her to work the handle. Laughing, she did so,' and as I raised my ■dripping head I saw her standing with the low western sun full upon her, her eyes laughing into mine, her nose and lips provocative, her plain blouse waist open at the throat so that I could see the gurgle of laughter rise. “Why did you do that?” she asked, arrested, perhaps, by something in my gaze. “Because,” I answered, “there’s a ghost lives In this well, and maybe with your aid I shall pump it out” “Don’t you like the ghost?" she said. “Very much,” said I, as we climbed the slope to Bert’s. That evening Mrs. Bert sent her off to bed, and I tolled cheerfully at my manuscripts till the unholy hour of eleven.

CHAPTER VII.

Picking Paint and a Quarrel. The next morning at breakfast a •burned nose confronted me across the table, and the possessor ruefully regarded her sore palms. “No work for you today,” said I. “You will just have to pick out colors for me. The painters are coming.” I spoke as if we were old friends. I spoke as If it were the most natural thing in the world for a young woman to accompany a young man to his house and pick out paint for him. I spoke, also, as if I bad never cursed the prospect of petticoats that advise. So soon can one pair of eyes undo our prejudices, and so easily are the conventions forgotten, in the natural life of the country—at least by such persons as never were much bothered by them, anyhow! s Evidently they had never greatly troubled Miss Goodwin, or she was not disposed to let them trouble her now, for ten minutes later we went down the road together, and found the painters already unloading their wagon. The reliable Hard Cider, true to his word, had procured .them for me, which, as I afterward have discovered, was something of a feat in Bentford, where promises are more common than fulfillment.

"Now,” said I, Tin not going to pa : per any rooms if I can help it. I want the walls calcimined. What color shall it be?” I turned toward Miss Goodwin as I spoke. She shook her head. "I’m not going to say a word,” she answered. “This Is your room.” ' “I suppose you want the woodwork white?” painter suggested: “These old mantels, for instance.” "Cream white, not dead white,” paid 1. "Wait a minute.” I ran to the shed li i mi brought back two more of my pictures. "Now,” said I, “the walls have got (to set off both these pictures, and books

besides. They’ve got to be neutral. I want a greenish, brownish, yellowish olive, with the old beam in the center of the celling in the same key, only a bit darker.” The girl and the painter both laughed. “You are so definite,” said she. "But I want an indefinite tint,” I replied. Again she laughed, though the painter looked puzzled. “I’ll get my colors.” he said. He mixed an olive tint, laid a streak of it on the plaster, and something emerged which looked right to me. We went into the little hall, where the front door stood open, and we could see Hard on a ladder mending the beautiful carved doorcap outside. “This hall the same color,” said I, “with the rails of the baluster in the cream white of the trim.” We went into the northeast room and the dining room behind it. ~. “Sam&color here '/’’asked the painter. I was about to answer yes, when Miss Goodwill spoke. “I should think you’d want these rooms lighter in color," she said, “as they face the north.”

“The lady’s right,” said the painter. “They always ate.” I smiled. "You two-fix up the color for this room, then. We can decide on the other rooms after these downstairs are done.” “No,” cried the girl, “I won’t do anything of the kind! You might not like what I picked.” “Incredible!” said I. “I’ve really got to get to work outside now.” And I ran off, leaving her looking a little angrily, I thought, after me. I was so impatient to see how my lawn was going to look that I went to the shed to hunt up a dummy sundia! post. In a loft under the eaves I saw

the dusty end of what looked like a Doric pillar poking out. I dragged the heavy column down, sawed off the upper four feet carefully, anti took my pedestal around to the lawn. Midway between the trellis and where the edge of my pergola was to be I placed the pillar. Then I took out my knife and thrust the blade lightly in at an angle, to simulate the dial marker, aud turned to call Miss Goodwin. v But she was already standing In the door. “Oh!” she cried, running lightly down the plank and across the ground, “a sundial already, and a real pedestal! Come away from it a little, and see how it seems to focus all the sunlight. We stood off near the house, and looked at the white column in midlawn. It did indeed seem to draw in the sunlight to this level spot before the' dwelling, even though it rose from the brown earth instead of rich greensward, and even though beyond it was but the unsightly, half-finished, naked trellis. Even as we watched, a,bird came swooping across the lawn, alighted on my knife handle, and began to carol.

“Oh, the darling!” cried Miss Goodwin. “He understands!” * I was very well content. I had Unexpectedly found a pedestal, and was experiencing for the first time the real sensation of garden warmth and intimacy and focused light which a sundial, rightly placed, can bring. I did not speak, and presently beside me I heard a voice saying, "But I forgot that I am angry at you.” “Why?” I asked. "Because you had no right to leave me to pick out the paint for dining room,” said she. i • ■

“Why not?” said I. “Y6u picked out the name of my house and the styls of the rose trellis.” “That was different,*’ she replied. “I don’t see why.” “Then you are extremely stupid,” she answered. “Doubtless,” said I. •“But that doesn’t help me any to understand, you know.” “Come,” she replied, “and see if the paint suits you. Then I must go home and write some letters,” I went back to my sundial, between two rows of cauliflower plants Bert had given to me, and which Mike had set out thus early for an experiment, between threads of sprouting radishes, lines of onion sets, and other succulent evidences of the season to come. As I marked out the beds around the pedestal, I found myself wishing Miss Goodwin were there to advise me. By then the hour was nearly twelve, and consequently too late to spade it under, so .1, plodded up the road to dinner. As I passed my potato -field, I saw rows of green shoots above the ground, and out under my lone pine I saw a figure, sitting in the shadow on the stone wall. I climbed through the brambles over the wall, and walked down the aisles of potatoes toward her. “It is time for dinner,” I said meekly. She looked up. “Is it? I have been listening to the old pine talk.” “What was he saying?” I asked. “Things you wouldn't understand," said she. < “About words in ‘hy’?” She shook her head. “Not at all; nothing quite so stupid—but nearly as saddening.” She rose to her feet, and her eyes looked into mine, enigmatically wistful. “I missed you after you went away from Twin Fires,” said I suddenly. *‘l don’t know whether I got the sundial beds right or not. Won’t you pleas® come back to tell me? Or am I stupid again, and mustn’t you advise me about that?” Her eyes twinkled a little. “You are still very stupid.” she said, “but perhaps I will consent to give my invaluable advlfle on this important subject.” “Good!” I cried. “And we’ll build some more trellis If your hands are better.” “My hands are all right,” she said, with the faintest emphasis on the noun, which made a variety of perplexing interpretations possible and kept me silent as I helped her over the wall into Bert’s great cauliflower field, and Vc tramped through the soft soli toward the house.

CHAPTER VIII.

I Write a Sonnet. After dinner stie approved the sundial beds with a mock-judicial gravity, and then she went at the trellis, working with a kind of impersonal nervous intensity that troubled me, I didn’t quite know why. She said, with a brief laugh, it was because she had suggested the structure, and she could never rest till any job she had undertaken was completed. “You live too hard,” said L “That’s the trouble with most of us nowadays. We are overcivilized. We don’t know how to take things easy, because w« have the vague idea of so many other things to be done always crowding across the threshold of our consciousness." “Perhaps,” she answered. “The ‘J* words, for instance, if they get ‘l’ done before my return. Thank heaven, ‘J* hasn’t contributed so many words to science ag ‘Hy’!” "Forget the dictionary!” I cried. “You are going to gtay here a long time —till these roses bloom, or at any rate till the sundial beds have come to flower. Besides, there’ll be a lot of things about my house where your advice cannot be spared.” She darted a quick look at me, and tutned back to the trellis, where she was nailing on strips. She did not speak, and when I came over to face her, with a post for the next arch, I savf that her half away, blinking her eyelids hard bit her lip, then picked up the level and set it with a slhack 'against the post. I put my hand over hers—both our hands were dirty!—and said* “What is the matter? Are you tired?” “Please, please —level this post,” sba replied. “Are you tired?” “No, I’m not tired. I’m a fool. Coma, we must finish the arch!”

I* It time for the hero to propose? Is Stella playing a little game to awaken his sympathy and lead him on to fie entanglements of love?

(TO B 3 CONTINUED^

COP YRIGHT by DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO.

I Found Myself Wishing Miss Goodwin Were There.