The Happy Average. Brand Whitlock

a fear took hold of him; the whole experience, the most wonderful of his life, grew more and more unreal. Much as he longed to see Lavinia again, he was afraid to go to her home; he wondered whether he should write her a note; perhaps she would think him false, perhaps she would think he had already forgotten her; the idea tormented him; he did not know what to do. He had seen her but once, and then at a distance; the Blairs’ well-known surrey had stopped in the middle of the Square, and George Halliday stood leaning into the carriage chatting with Lavinia. Marley had but a glimpse of Lavinia’s face, pink in the shadow of the surrey-top. As they drove away she had turned with a smile and a nod at Halliday. The sight had affected Marley strangely.

      He felt himself so weak and incapable in this affair that he longed to discuss it with some one, and on Sunday afternoon he found his mother at her window with the Christian Advocate, which replaced, in her case, the nap nearly every one else took at that hour.

      “How old was father when you were married, mother?” he began.

      He spoke out of that curious ignorance of the lives of their parents so common to children; he had never been able to realize his parents as having separate and independent existences before his own. Mrs. Marley laid her paper by, and a smile came to her face.

      “He was twenty-two,” she said.

      “Just my age,” observed Marley.

      Mrs. Marley looked up hastily.

      “You’re not thinking of getting married, are you, Glenn?” she asked.

      “No.” he said with a laugh.

      “My goodness! You’re just a boy!”

      “But I’m as old as father was.”

      “Y—es,” said Mrs. Marley, “but then—”

      “But then, what?”

      “That was different.”

      Marley smiled.

      “Had father entered the ministry yet?” he said presently.

      “Yes, we were married in his first year. He had been teaching school, and the fall he was admitted to the conference he was sent out to the Gibsonburg circuit in Green County. We were married in the spring.”

      Her face flushed, and she turned the pages of her paper with a dreamy deliberation.

      “Ah, but your father was a handsome young man, Glenn!” she said presently.

      “He’s handsome yet,” Marley replied with the pride he always felt in his father. And then he asked:

      “Did he have any money?”

      “Yes,” she said, and she laughed, “just a hundred dollars!”

      “A hundred dollars! Well, he had nerve, didn’t he? And so did you!”

      “We had more than that,” said Mrs. Marley, solemnly.

      Marley looked at his mother suddenly. Her face seemed for an instant to be transfigured in the afternoon glow.

      He might have told her then; he was on the point of it, but a footfall on the brick walk outside caused him to look up, and he saw Lawrence coming into the yard. Lawrence beckoned him and he went out.

      “Come on,” said Lawrence. “Let’s go out to Carters’.”

      Marley looked a question at him, and the smile which Lawrence never could repress long at a time was twitching at the corners of his large mouth.

      “She’ll be there.”

      “How do you know?” asked Marley.

      Lawrence smiled a little more significantly.

      When they got to the Carters’ they found Mayme and Lavinia together in the yard, strolling about in apparent aimlessness, yet with an expectancy in their manner that belied its quality of mere idleness. In the look Lavinia gave him all of Marley’s perplexities vanished. Lawrence stood by with a grin on his red face, and Mayme Carter’s eyes danced. She and Lawrence assumed almost immediately an elder, paternal manner, and looked on at the lovers’ meeting as from far heights that were to be reached only after all such youthful experiences had long since become possible in retrospect alone. Still smiling, they edged away, and left the lovers alone.

      “Is it really true?” Marley asked.

      Lavinia colored a little as she smiled up at him.

      “And you are happy?” he asked.

      “So happy!” she said.

      And then all at once a cloud came over her eyes. She closed them an instant.

      “What is it?” he asked in alarm.

      “Nothing.”

      “Tell me.”

      “It’s nothing.” She was smiling again, as if to show that her happiness was complete. “See?” Her eyes were blinking rapidly.

      “I’m glad,” he said.

      As they turned and walked across the yard Marley looked at her nervously.

      “Do you know,” he said, “that I couldn’t remember what color your eyes were?” He spoke with all the virtue there is in confession.

      “What color are they?” she asked, suddenly closing her eyes.

      “They’re blue,” Marley replied, saying the word ecstatically, as if it had a new, wonderful meaning for him.

      “Connie says they’re green.”

      “Connie?”

      “Yes, don’t you know? She’s my younger sister.”

      “Oh.” He did not know any of her family, and the baffling sense of unreality came over him again.

      “You’ll know her,” said Lavinia, and added thoughtfully: “I hope she’ll like you. Then there’s Chad, my little brother.”

      Marley was growing alarmed at the intricacies of an introduction into a large family, the characters of which were as yet like the characters in the first few chapters of a novel, but he thought it would not reflect on him to admit that he did not know Chad, seeing that he was merely a little brother.

      “He admires you immensely,” said Lavinia.

      “Does he?” said Marley, eagerly, instantly loving Chad. “How does he know me?”

      “He says you were a football player at college.”

      Marley laughed a modest deprecation of his own prowess.

      “But I knew your voice,” said Lavinia.

      “Did you? When did you hear it?”

      “As if you didn’t know!”

      “Honestly,” he protested. “Tell me.”

      “Why, that night that you serenaded me.”

      He was regretting that she had outdone him in observation, but she suddenly looked up and said:

      “Oh, Glenn! What a beautiful voice you have!”

      It was the first time she had ever called him Glenn, and it produced in him a wonderful sensation.

      They had come to a little bench, and, sitting there, they could only look at each other and smile. Marley noticed that a little line of freckles ran up over the bridge of Lavinia’s nose. They were very beautiful, he thought, and yet he had never heard of freckles as one of the elements of a woman’s beauty. Then he leaned back and looked about the yard.

      He had always thought of it as it seemed that first night, enormous, enchanted, with wide terraces and fountains, and white statues gleaming through the green shrubbery. But now he saw no terraces, no statuary, no fountains, and no wide lawns; nothing but a cramped little yard crowded with bushes and trees, and surrounded by a weathered fence that had lost several pickets. He looked around behind the house where he had fancied long stables with big iron lamps over the doors, but now he saw nothing but an old woodshed and a barn on the rear end of the lot.