By and by Sarah forced back her tears. The cards must be written. But,
still in a faint, golden glow from her dandeleonine dream, she fingered
the typewriter keys absently for a little while, with her mind and
heart in the meadow lane with her young farmer. But soon she came
swiftly back to the rock-bound lanes of Manhattan, and the typewriter
began to rattle and jump like a strike-breaker’s motor car.
At 6 o’clock the waiter brought her dinner and carried away the
typewritten bill of fare. When Sarah ate she set aside, with a sigh,
the dish of dandelions with its crowning ovarious accompaniment. As
this dark mass had been transformed from a bright and love-indorsed
flower to be an ignominious vegetable, so had her summer hopes wilted
and perished. Love may, as Shakespeare said, feed on itself: but Sarah
could not bring herself to eat the dandelions that had graced, as
ornaments, the first spiritual banquet of her heart’s true affection.
At 7:30 the couple in the next room began to quarrel: the man in the
room above sought for A on his flute; the gas went a little lower;
three coal wagons started to unload—the only sound of which the
phonograph is jealous; cats on the back fences slowly retreated toward
Mukden. By these signs Sarah knew that it was time for her to read. She
got out “The Cloister and the Hearth,” the best non-selling book of the
month, settled her feet on her trunk, and began to wander with Gerard.
The front door bell rang. The landlady answered it. Sarah left Gerard
and Denys treed by a bear and listened. Oh, yes; you would, just as she
did!
And then a strong voice was heard in the hall below, and Sarah jumped
for her door, leaving the book on the floor and the first round easily
the bear’s. You have guessed it. She reached the top of the stairs just
as her farmer came up, three at a jump, and reaped and garnered her,
with nothing left for the gleaners.
“Why haven’t you written—oh, why?” cried Sarah.
“New York is a pretty large town,” said Walter Franklin. “I came in a
week ago to your old address. I found that you went away on a Thursday.
That consoled some; it eliminated the possible Friday bad luck. But it
didn’t prevent my hunting for you with police and otherwise ever since!
“I wrote!” said Sarah, vehemently.
“Never got it!”
“Then how did you find me?”
The young farmer smiled a springtime smile.
“I dropped into that Home Restaurant next door this evening,” said he.
“I don’t care who knows it; I like a dish of some kind of greens at
this time of the year. I ran my eye down that nice typewritten bill of
fare looking for something in that line. When I got below cabbage I
turned my chair over and hollered for the proprietor. He told me where
you lived.”
“I remember,” sighed Sarah, happily. “That was dandelions below
cabbage.”
“I’d know that cranky capital W way above the line that your typewriter
makes anywhere in the world,” said Franklin.
“Why, there’s no W in dandelions,” said Sarah, in surprise.