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Vennard fussed and fidgeted, in vain little Jane uttered any of her brisk, but sorry jesting, in vain Vivia's gentle voice; it all touched Ray's heart no other way than as the rain slips along a tombstone.
As for Vivia, she burst into tears. "Oh, Ray!" sobbed she, "I wish I were a man!" "I don't!" said he. "Oh, it's rip-roarious! Come, let's follow our leader. We'll bring you back the cropple-crown, auntie." And so they departed, while, breaking into fresh carols, ringing and dulcet, as they went, Vivia's voice resounded till the woods pealed to the echo:
"Two striking examples before you," said little Jane, with a laugh, as she looked at her old print and at Vivia's gray gown. "I wasn't thinking of you. I saw the ladies in the village yesterday, they were pied and parded." "Children," said Mrs. Vennard from within, "I've taken up the coffee now. I sha'n't wait a minute longer. Vivia, I'll beat an egg into yours."
But there was a drearier want at Vivia's door, which neither that nor any other wealth would ever meet. Little Jane came up the field with a basket of the last barberries lightly poised upon her head. A narrow wrinkle was beginning to divide the freckled fairness of her forehead. She kept it down with many an endeavor.
Trying to croon to herself as she passed, and stopping only to hang one of the scarlet girandoles in Vivia's braids, she went in. The sunshine, loath to leave her pleasant little figure, followed after her, and played about her shadow on the floor.
Still they wind away in their gladness, when hurriedly Beltran reaches his hand for the heedless Vivia's, and hurriedly she sees terrifying grooves spreading round them, a great web-work of cracks, the awful ice lifts itself, sinks, and out of a monstrous fissure chill death rises to meet them and ingulf them.
Garrets and closets surrendered their hoards to her; files of old newspapers, old ledgers, old letter-backs, began to accumulate in heaps, everything but books, for Jane had a religious respect for their recondite lore; she cut the margins off the magazines, and she grew miserly of the very shreds ravelling under Vivia's fingers.
Other words there were in the letter, such words as are written to but one; the blood swept up to Vivia's lips as she recalled them, and her heart sprang and bounded like one of those balls kept in perpetual play by the leaping, bubbling column of a fountain. She was in one of those dangerous states of excitement after which the ancients awaited disaster.
But, after a moment's thought, the astonished recipient kept it for a use of her own. Finally, one night, Ray proposed to instruct Janet in some particular branch of his general ignorance; and after those firelight-recitations, little Jane forgot to move her seat away, and her hand was kept in his through all the hour of Vivia's slow enchantment.
But it was a horror which nothing wholly lulled to sleep at last but Vivia's singing. Every night, for an hour or more, Vivia wrought the music's spell about him, while he lay back in his chair, and little Jane retreated across the hearth, not daring to intrude on such a season.
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