Benediction

The Baltimore Station was hot and crowded, so Lois was forced to
stand by the telegraph desk for interminable, sticky seconds
while a clerk with big front teeth counted and recounted a large
lady's day message, to determine whether it contained the
innocuous forty-nine words or the fatal fifty-one.

Lois, waiting, decided she wasn't quite sure of the address, so
she took the letter out of her bag and ran over it again.

"Darling," IT BEGAN--"I understand and I'm happier than life ever
meant me to be. If I could give you the things you've always
been in tune with--but I can't Lois; we can't marry and we can't
lose each other and let all this glorious love end in nothing.

"Until your letter came, dear, I'd been sitting here in the half
dark and thinking where I could go and ever forget you; abroad,
perhaps, to drift through Italy or Spain and dream away the pain
of having lost you where the crumbling ruins of older, mellower
civilizations would mirror only the desolation of my heart--and
then your letter came.

"Sweetest, bravest girl, if you'll wire me I'll meet you in
Wilmington--till then I'll be here just waiting and hoping for
every long dream of you to come true.
"Howard."

She had read the letter so many times that she knew it word by
word, yet it still startled her. In it she found many faint
reflections of the man who wrote it--the mingled sweetness and
sadness in his dark eyes, the furtive, restless excitement she
felt sometimes when he talked to her, his dreamy sensuousness
that lulled her mind to sleep. Lois was nineteen and very
romantic and curious and courageous.

The large lady and the clerk having compromised on fifty words,
Lois took a blank and wrote her telegram. And there were no
overtones to the finality of her decision.

It's just destiny--she thought--it's just the way things work
out in this damn world. If cowardice is all that's been holding
me back there won't be any more holding back. So we'll just let
things take their course and never be sorry.

The clerk scanned her telegram:

"Arrived Baltimore today spend day with my brother meet me
Wilmington three P.M. Wednesday
Love

"Lois."

"Fifty-four cents," said the clerk admiringly.

And never be sorry--thought Lois--and never be sorry---

II

Trees filtering light onto dapple grass. Trees like tall, languid
ladies with feather fans coquetting airily with the ugly roof of
the monastery. Trees like butlers, bending courteously over
placid walks and paths. Trees, trees over the hills on either
side and scattering out in clumps and lines and woods all through
eastern Maryland,