The Lute of the Holy Ghost Breaks His Fast

In his cautious approach to the Daggin house, he came upon her unawares—­a slight, slender, shapely thing of pink and golden flame, as she poised where the sun came full upon her.  One hand clutched her flowing blue skirts snugly about her ankles; the other opened coaxingly to a kitten crouched to spring on the limb of an apple-tree above her.  The head was thrown back, the vivid lips were parted, and he heard her laugh low to herself.  Near by was a towering rose-bush, from which she had broken the last red rose, large, full, and lush, its petals already loosened.  Now she wrenched away a handful of these, and flung them upward at the watchful kitten.  The scarlet flecks drifted back around her and upon her.  Like little red butterflies hovering in golden sunlight, they lodged in her many-braided yellow hair, or fluttered down the long curls that hung in front of her ears.  She laughed again under the caressing shower.  Then she tore away the remaining petals and tossed them up with an elf-like daintiness, not at the crouched and expectant kitten this time, but so that the whole red rain floated tenderly down upon her upturned face and into the folds of the white kerchief crossed upon her breast.  She waited for the last feathery petal.  Her hidden lover saw it lodge in the little hollow at the base of her bare, curved throat.  He could hold no longer.

Stepping from the covert that had shielded him, he called softly to her.

“Prudence—­Prue!”

She had reached again for the kitten, but at the sound of his low, vigorous note, she turned quickly toward him, colouring with a glow that spread from the corner of the crossed kerchief up to the yellow hair above her brow.  She answered with quick breaths.

“Joel—­Joel—­Joel!”

She laughed aloud, clapping her small hands, and he ran to her—­over beds of marigolds, heartsease, and lady’s-slippers, through a row of drowsy-looking, heavy-headed dahlias, and past other withering flowers, all but choked out by the rank garden growths of late summer.  Then his arms opened and seemed to swallow the leaping little figure, though his kisses fell with hardly more weight upon the yielded face than had the rose-petals a moment since, so tenderly mindful was his ardour.  She submitted, a little as the pampered kitten had before submitted to her own pettings.

“You dear old sobersides, you—­how gaunt and careworn you look, and how hungry, and what wild eyes you have to frighten one with!  At first I thought you were a crazy man.”

He held her face up to his eager eyes, having no words to say, overcome by the joy that surged through him like a mighty rush of waters.  In the moment’s glorious certainty he rested until she stirred nervously under his devouring look, and spoke.

“Come, kiss me now and let me go.”

He kissed her eyes so that she shut them; then he kissed her lips—­long—­letting her go at last, grudgingly, fearfully, unsatisfied.