More Diplomacy.

I now verily believe that Jennie from the first had made up her mind that we were to settle in Wheathedge.  Though I never liked the country, she did.  And I now think that summer at Wheathedge was her first step toward a settlement there.  But she never hinted it to me.

Not she.  On the contrary, she often went down to the city with me, and shortened the car ride by half.  We kept the city house open.  She exercised a watchful supervision over the cook.  The sheets were not damp, the coffee was not muddy, the library table was not covered with dust.  I blessed her a hundred times a week for the love that found us both this Wheathedge home, and made the city home so comfortable and cosy.  Yet I came to my house in the city less and less.  The car ride grew shorter every week.  When the courts closed and the long vacation, arrived I bade the cook an indefinite good-bye.  My clients had to conform to the new office hours, 10 to 3, with Saturdays struck off the office calendar, and, in the dog days, Mondays too.  Yet I was within call, and business ran smoothly.  The country looked brighter than it used to do.  I learned to enjoy the glorious sunrise that New Yorkers never see.  I discovered that there were other indications of a moonlight night than the fact that the street lamps were not lighted.  Harry grew fat and rosy, and his little chuckle developed into a lusty laugh.  Jennie’s headaches were blown away by the fresh air that came down from the north.  I found the fragrance of the new mown hay from the Glen-Rridge meadow more agreeable than the fragrant odors which the westerly winds waft over to Murray Hill from the bone boiling establishments of the Hudson river.  Every evening Jennie met me at the train with Tom—­Mr. Lines’ best horse, whom I liked so well that I hired him for the season; and we took long drives and renewed the scenes of five years before, when Jennie was Jennie Malcolm, and I was just graduating from Harvard law-school.  And still the diplomate never hinted at the idea of making a home at Wheathedge.

But one day as we drove by Mr. Sinclair’s she remarked casually, “What a pretty place!”

It was a pretty place.  A little cottage, French gray with darker trimmings of the same; the tastiest little porch with a something or other—­I know the vine by sight but not to this day by name—­creeping over it, and converting it into a bower; another porch fragrant with climbing roses and musical with the twittering of young swallows who had made their nests in little chambers curiously constructed under the eaves and hidden among the sheltering leaves; a green sward sweeping down to the road, with a few grand old forest trees scattered carelessly about as though nature had been the landscape gardner; and prettiest of all, a little boy and girl playing horse upon the gravel walk, and filling the air with shouts of merry laughter—­all this combined to make as pretty a picture as one would wish to see.  The western sun poured a flood of light upon it through crimson clouds, and a soft glory from the dying day made this little Eden of earth more radiant by a baptism from heaven.