Taft was certainly failing. In five
minutes he found himself at a well-known little table, with the
tavern-staple for odd meals, ham and eggs, flanked with sweetmeats and
cake, just as he remembered of old. He nibbled at the sharp barberries
lying black in the boiled molasses, and listened eagerly to the talk
about British aggressions which was going on in the bar-room. Suddenly a
face looked in at the low window.
Swan sprang forward, kicked over his chair, and knocked the earthen
pepper-box off the table. Before he reached the window, however, the
shadow had passed round the corner of the house, out of sight.
It was only a youthful figure, surmounted by a broad-brimmed straw hat,
that half hid two sweet, sparkling eyes. Ah! but they were Dorcas's
eyes!
He picked up the pepper-box, and mechanically sifted its contents into
the barberry-dish.
Dorcas's eyes,--lips,--cheeks,--and waving grace! A rocking movement, a
sort of beating, bounding, choking emotion, made the room suddenly dark,
and he fell heavily into a chair.
The landlord opened the door, and said,--
"The hoss and shay ready, any time."
Swan roused himself, and drove away, without speaking to any of the
smoking loungers on the stoop, to whom he was as if he had never been
born. But this, from his preoccupied state, did not strike him as
singular. One little voice, a bird's voice, as he drove along through
the pine woods, sang over and over the same tune,--"Dorcas! Dorcas!"
The silence of the road, when all animated Nature slept in the warm noon
of the late autumn day, when even the wheels scarcely sounded on the
dead pine-spears, made this solitary voice, like Swan's newly awakened
memory, all but angelic.
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