The Day of His Youth

								

blood ran fast. Was she cold? Was she shivering? Fools, to let so
delicate a creature go into the water at night! The men were fools.

III
Ask me now what of the night and what of the day, for I am the watchman
who is fixing his eyes upon life and finding it good. Again I knew
there were events in the wind. This morning my father, too, was uneasy,
and when we had finished our work, we went out together to the grove
near the landing, each with a book; but we did not read. He watched the
lake, and I tried not to listen for the dip of oars. At last it
came,--O happy sound!--and when I started up, I found his glance upon
me.
"Yes, they are coming," he said sadly, bitterly. "It seems we both
expected it."
I could not answer, for I do not understand him. Why should it be a
grief to him more than to me, this seeing men and women who talk and
laugh, with whom one could say all one thought without being
misunderstood, and who can bring us such news of the world? But I had
not time to say these things, for they were coming, two boatloads of
them; and I ran down to the landing to meet them. She was in the first
boat, her hair covered now, but kissed by the sun wherever he could
reach it. With her was an older woman, the brown-eyed young one, and
the same young men. The boat touched the landing, and I helped the
other women ashore; but she put her fingers on the shoulder of a man in
the boat and stepped past me. Why? why? my heart cried out to her. Does
she hate me for last night? Am I so different from her people because I
live in the woods? In the moment I hesitated, thinking it over, they
all got on shore, and were standing about my father and talking to him.
Then I found he had known them, years ago.
"You have changed," the older woman was saying. "You are sadder, but
not so bitter."
"That must be because of my son," he said. And he turned to me, and
named me to them, and I heard their names. She is Zoe Montrose, the
older woman is her aunt, and the two men her cousins; the others, all
young, all laughing, and looking and moving about like birds, are
friends.
"Do you mean to say you have brought him up in this wilderness?" asked
Mrs. Montrose in a whisper I heard. "He is perfect." And then she
added, after a quick glance at my face, "Quite perfect, for he can
blush."
My father turned aside as if he had no stomach for soft speeches, and
asked them to sit on the bank, because it was pleasanter out of doors.
And though Mrs. Montrose said plainly that she wished to see how we
lived, he only smiled and led her to a seat under a tree. No one can
withstand my father. It seems to me, now that I see him with other
people, that he is far finer, more courteous, more commanding than any
of them.
"Bring us the wine, Francis," he said to me, and I went in to find he
had set it out on a salver in a beautiful decanter I had never seen,
and that there were glasses and bits of bread all ready, as if he had