“Did I? Don’t we?” stammered RoBards, so pitifully rejoiced to find her loyal to him and to their sacred union that he gathered her in his arms, and almost sobbed, “Oh, my dear! my sweet! my darling!” Though she was as soft and flexile as a shaft of weeping willow, somehow she was like a stout spar upholding him in the deep waters of fear, and he felt most ludicrously happy when she talked nursery talk to him and cooed: “Poor, little David baby wants its Patty to love it, doesn’t it?” He could not answer in her language, but he felt a divinity in it, and was miserably drenched in ecstasy. And she had used his first name! CHAPTER IV By and by the summer sifted from the trees and ebbed from the sky. The honeymoon passed like a summer, in days and nights of hot beauty, in thunder-salvos of battle, in passions of impatient rain. For a while the autumn was a greater splendor, a transit from a green earth starred with countless blossoms of scarlet, purple, azure, to a vast realm of gold—red gold, yellow gold, green gold, but always and everywhere gold. All Westchester was a treasure-temple of glory. Then the grandeur dulled, the gold was gilt, was only patches of gilt, was russet, was shoddy. The trees were bare. Sharp outlines of unsuspected landscape came forth like hags whose robes have dropped from their gaunt bones. The wind grew despondent. Savor went with color; hope was memory; warmth, chill. Something mournful in the air reminded RoBards of a poem that Mr. Bryant, the editor of the _Post_, had written a few years before: “The melancholy days have come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere; Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s tread.” When he quoted this to Patty, her practical little soul was moved, as always, to the personal: “Your Mr. Bryant writes better than he fights, Mist’ RoBards. Only last year, almost in front of our house, I saw him attack Mr. Stone, of the _Commercial Advertiser_, with a horsewhip. Mr. Stone carried off the whip. It was disgusting, but it brightened Broadway. Oh, dear, does nothing exciting ever happen up here? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to stroll down to the Battery to watch the sunset and cross the bridge to Castle Garden, and hear the band play, and talk to all our friends? And go to a dance, perhaps, or a theatre? The Kembles are there setting the town on fire! And am I never to dance again? I was just learning to waltz when the cholera came. I sha’n’t be able to dance at all unless we go at once.”