City and town life -- Fiction; Romance fiction, American; Short stories, American
The sentence fell between them unfinished. And I thought that Miggy's
face, still somewhat saddened by the little Kenneth and now tender with
its look for the picture, was lightly touched with a glowing of colour.
But then I saw that this would be the light of the sunset on her cheeks,
for now the West was become a glory of rose and yellow, so that it held
captive her eyes. It is too frail a thing for me to have grasped by
sense, but the Moment seemed to say--and could give no reason--that our
sunset compact Miggy kept then without remembering the compact.
It almost startled me when out in the unkept garden Little Child began
to sing. We had nearly forgotten her and we could not see her, so that
she might have been any other little child wandering in the sweet
clover, or merely a little voice coming in with the western light:--
"I like to stand in this great air
And see the sun go down.
It shows me a bright veil to wear
And such a pretty gown.
Oh, I can see a playmate there
Far up in Splendour Town!"
"Look here," said Peter to Miggy; and I went over to the sunset window
and let them go on alone.
He led her about the room, and she still had the little picture in her
hand. From the bureau, with its small array of cheap brushes and boxes,
she turned abruptly away. I think that she may have felt as I felt
about the splash of rose on the rose-breasted grosbeak's throat--that I
ought not to have been looking. Beyond was a little old dry-goods box
for odds and ends, a box which must have known, with a kind of feminine
intelligence, that it ought to be covered with cretonne. On this box
Miggy knelt to read Peter's high school diploma, and she stopped before
a picture of the house where he was born. "Was it there?" she asked.
"Doesn't that seem funny?" Which manifestly it did not seem. "Is _that_
where your violin lives?" she asked, when they came to its
corner--surely a way of betrayal that she had thought of it as living
somewhere else. And all the while she carried the picture in her hand,
and the sunset glorified the room, and Little Child was singing in the
garden.
"Peter," said Miggy, "I don't believe a man who can play the violin can
sew. Give me the needle kit. I'm going to mend the table cover--may I?"
Might she! Peter, his face shining, brought out his red flannel
needle-book--he kept it on the shelf with his shaving things!--and, his
face shining more, sat on a creaking camp-chair and watched her.
"Miggy," he said, as she caught the threads skilfully together, "I don't
believe I've ever seen you sew. I know I never have."
"This isn't sewing," Miggy said.
"It's near enough like it to suit me," said Peter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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