XIII.—THE HEART OF LOVE.

The day lilies were in bloom, and that meant August; it meant also that her book was written, rewritten, and ready to be copied.

“Oh, that my poor little book were as perfect as you,” she sighed one morning as she arranged them with their broad, green leaves for the vases in parlor and sitting-room. “But God made you with His own fingers, and He made my book through my own fancies.”

She had worked early and late, not flagging, through all the sultry days. “You will make yourself sick,” her mother had warned, “and it will cost you all you earn to buy beef tea and pay the doctor; so where is the good of it?”

She had read her manuscript aloud to her father, and he had laughed and wiped his eyes and given sundry appreciative exclamations.

“That writing takes a precious sight of time,” her mother had remonstrated.

“That is because I am human.” Tessa had answered soberly.

“Suppose it is refused.”

“Then I’ll be like William Howitt; his book was refused four times and he stood on London bridge ready to toss it over. I do not think that I will do as Charlotte Bronte did; she sent a rejected manuscript to a publisher wrapped in the wrapper in which the first publisher had rolled it. I suppose that his address was printed on it.”

She had run on merrily as she had placed the cool, pure lilies in the vase; but her heart was sinking, nevertheless. It had always taken so little to exhilarate or depress her.

“Must you write to-day?” inquired her mother one morning in an unsatisfied tone.

“Several hours.”

“I wanted you to make calls with me and to help me with the currant jelly and to put those button-holes into my linen wrapper.”

“I can do it all, but I must write while I am fresh.”

The first hour she wrote wearily; then she lost the small struggles in her own life and became comforted through the comfort wherewith she comforted others. Not one thing was forgotten, not one household duty shirked, the jelly was made to perfection, the button-holes worked while her mother was taking her afternoon nap, the calls were pushed through, and then Mrs. Wadsworth proposed a call upon Mrs. Towne.

“I promised your Aunt Dinah that I would call.”

Tessa demurred although she remembered her promise; she much preferred calling some time when Aunt Dinah should be with her; Mrs. Wadsworth insisted and Tessa yielded more graciously in manner than in mind.

Mrs. Towne received them most cordially and gracefully; an expression flitted over her eyes as Tessa looked up into them that she never forgot; it touched her as Dr. Lake’s eyes did, sometimes; what could this beautiful old mother need in her? Whatever it might be, she felt fully prepared to give it.

Mrs. Wadsworth was as effusively talkative as usual; Tessa replied when spoken to; lively, fussy, pretty little Mrs. Wadsworth did not compare to her own advantage with her womanly daughter. Mrs. Towne looked at Tessa and thought of the picture that she had seen; it was certainly excellent only that the picture was rather too intellectual; in the picture she might have written “Mechanism of the Heavens” but sitting there in the crimson velvet chair with a pale blue bow among her braids and her soft gray veil shading her cheek she was more like the daughter that she had ever dreamed of—simple, sweet, and thoroughly lovable Mrs. Towne was a trifle afraid of a woman who looked too intellectual. Would she forgive Ralph and trust him again? She was sure that she would until Tessa unbuttoned her glove and drew it off; the slight, strong hand was a revelation; the girl had a will of her own. But might not her will be towards him? “I wish that I knew nothing,” thought the mother, “the suspense will weary me, the disappointment will be nearly as much for me as for the boy.”

Meanwhile, unconscious Tessa, with the glove in her fingers, was far away in the Milan cathedral on the wall opposite her, looking into the arches of the choir, feeling the sunlight through the glimmering painted windows, thinking about the procession of the scarlet-robed priests, and wondering about the hidden chancel; if the picture were upon her wall how it would glow and become alive in the western light, the drooping banners would stir with the breath of the evening, the censers would swing and the notes of the organ would bear her up and away. Away! Where? Was not all her world in this little Dunellen?

“My son is always busy; he rushes into every thing that he undertakes.”

The mother had a voice like the son’s; the soul of sincerity was in it; the sincere, sympathetic voice, the rush of feeling, love, regret, and sense of loss that it brought filled her eyes too full to be raised. At that instant Mrs. Towne was observing her; her heart grew lighter, hoping for the thing that might be.

Mrs. Towne held Tessa’s hand at parting. “I am an old woman, so I may ask a favor of a young one, will you come soon again?”

“Thank you, yes.”

“And often?”

Then she had to promise again. Dr. Towne was seldom at home; she thought of this when she promised. She was thinking of it that evening in the early twilight as she weeded among her pansies. Dine said that it was a wonder that she had not turned into a pansy herself by this time.

“Daughter, why do you sigh?”

Her father was seated in a rustic chair on the piazza with a copy of Burns unopened upon his knee; he had left the store earlier than usual that afternoon, complaining of the old pain in his side.

“My sigh must be very loud or your ears very sharp,” she replied, lifting her head. “I will bring you some perfect pansies.”

He took them and looked down at them; she stood at his side smoothing the straggling locks on his bald forehead with her perfumed, soiled fingers. “I think that if I knew nothing about God but that He made pansies, I should love Him for that,” she said at last.

“Is that what you were sighing over?”

“The sigh came out of the heart of the pansy. I wish I knew how to love somebody.”

“Is that what you were sighing over?”

“I do not know how,” rubbing the soil from her fingers, “to love when I lose faith. I do not know how and it worries me.”

“You mean that you do not know how to honor and trust when you lose faith. Are you so far on the journey of life as that? Must I congratulate you, daughter?”

“No; teach me.”

“No human teaching can teach you to love where you have lost faith.”

“Well; nobody asks me to!”

“If any body ever does, look at your own failings; that pulls me through.”

“I understand that,” still speaking in a troubled voice, “but all the love and patience do no good; people do not change because we love them.”

“No, they do not change, but we change.”

“That is not enough for me; I am not satisfied with the blessing of giving, I want the other somebody to have the blessing of receiving.”

“We do not know the end.”

“You two people do find queer things to talk about,” cried a lively voice behind them. “If I knew what mystical meant, I should say that it was you and Tessa. Don’t you want to hear all about Mrs. Towne, and what a lovely room we were taken into?”

“Yes, dear, and how her hair was fixed and just how she was dressed.”

Tessa ran back to her pansies; Mrs. Wadsworth had found a theme to enlarge upon for the next half hour. As Tessa worked among the flowers, a poem that she had learned that day while making the button-holes sang itself through and through her heart.

“Oh the hurt and the hurt and the hurt of love! Wherever the sun shines, the waters go, It hurts the snowdrop, it hurts the dove, God on His throne, and man below. But sun would not shine nor waters go, Snowdrop tremble nor fair dove moan, God be on high, nor man below, But for love—the love with its hurt alone. Thou knowest, O, Saviour, its hurt and its sorrows, Didst rescue its joy by the might of Thy pain; Lord of all yesterdays, days, and to-morrows, Help us love on in the hope of Thy gain! Hurt as it may, love on, love forever; Love for love’s sake like the Father above, But for whose brave-hearted Son we had never Known the sweet hurt of the sorrowful love.”

“I am not sincere in repeating that,” she mused. “I don’t love on, love forever—and I don’t want to! If I were in a book, every thing would make no difference, nothing would make a difference—would love on, love forever—and I don’t know how. I wish I did. It would not change him, but it would make me very glad and very good! I can not attain to it.”

The grazing sound of wheels brought her back to the pansies, then to Dr. Lake; he had driven up close to the opening in the lilac shrubbery.

“Ah, Mystic.”

“Good evening, doctor.”

It was the first time that they had been alone together since Sue’s engagement. She had been dreading this first time. She arose and brushed her hands against each other, moving towards the opening in the lilacs.

“I saw you, and could not resist the temptation of stopping to speak to you.”

“Thank you,” she said warmly. “Will you have a lily?”

“No, lilies are not for me. Briers and thorns grow for me.”

“Where are you riding to now?”

“Felix Harrison came home yesterday worse than ever. I was there in the night and am going again. Why don’t he die now that he has a chance? Catch me throwing away such an opportunity.”

“I hope that you will never have such an opportunity,” she answered, not thinking of what she was saying.

“That’s always the way; the lucky ones die, the unlucky ones live.”

“Can you not resist the temptation to tell me any thing so trite as that?”

“Don’t be sharp, Mystic.”

She was leaning against the low fence, her hands folded over each other, a breath of air stirring the wavy hair around her temples, and touching the pale blue ribbon at her throat, a white, graceful figure, speaking in her animated way with the flush of the pink rose tinting her cheeks and a misty veil shadowing her eyes.

“A very pretty picture in a frame-work of brown and green,” thought the old man in the rustic chair on the piazza.

But she never thought of making a picture of herself, she left such small coquetries to girls who had nothing better to do or to think of. She had her life to live and her books to write! Nevertheless two pairs of eyes found her pleasant to look upon. Dr. Lake’s experiences had opened his eyes to see that Tessa Wadsworth was unlike any woman that he had ever known; she was to him the calm of the moonlight, the fragrance of the spring, and the restfulness of trust.

In these weeks of his trouble, had she been like some other of the Dunellen girls, she would have found her way without pushing into his heart by the wide door that shallow Sue had left ajar.

His heart was open to any attractive woman who would sympathize with him; to any woman who would be glad of what Sue Greyson had thrown away; she might have become aware of this but for her instinctive habit of looking upward to love; even the tenderest compassion mingled with some admiration could not grow into love with her in her present moods; she was too young and asked too much of life for such a possibility.

In these days every man was too far below George Macdonald and Frederick Robertson, unless indeed it might be the new Greek professor; in her secret heart she had begun to wonder if Philip Towne were not something like them both; perhaps because in his sermon that Sunday twilight in the Park he had quoted a “declaration of Robertson’s”—“I am better acquainted with Jesus Christ than I am with any man on earth.”

The words came to her as she stood, to-night, talking with Dr Lake; she was wishing that she might repeat them to him; instead she only replied, “Why shouldn’t I be sharp? You are a man and therefore able to bear it.”

“Not much of a man—or wholly a man. I reckon that is nearer right. I never saw a man yet that a blow from a woman’s little finger wouldn’t knock him over.”

“Not any woman’s finger.”

“Any thing would blow me over to-night. Why do women have to make so many things when they are married?” he asked earnestly.

“To keep the love they have won,” she said with a mischievous laugh. “Don’t you know how soon roses fade after they are rudely torn from the protection and nourishment of the parent stem?”

“Rudely! They flutter, they pant, they struggle to tear themselves loose! Why do you suppose that she prefers Stacey to me?”

“I don’t know all things.”

“You know that. Answer.”

“She does not prefer him. He is the smallest part of her calculations. Marriage with you would make no change in her life; she seeks change; she has never been married and lived in Philadelphia—therefore to be married and live in Philadelphia must be glorious.”

“Then if I had money to take her anywhere and everywhere she would have married me. I’ll turn highwayman to get rich then. She shows me every pretty thing she makes; dresses up in all her new dresses and asks me if I feel like the bridegroom lends me her engagement ring when she is tired of it. I’d bite it in two if I dared—reads me his letters and asks me to help her answer them for she can only write a page and a half out of her own head.”

Tessa laughed; it was better to laugh than to be angry, and Sue could not be any body but Sue Greyson.

“She says that her only objection to him is his name and age; she likes my name better, and scribbles Sue Greyson Lake over his old envelopes. I would like to send him one of them. I was reading in the paper this morning of a man who shot the girl that refused him; if I don’t shoot her it will not be her fault, she is driving me mad. If I can’t have her myself, he sha’n’t!”

She dropped her hands and turned away from him.

“Mystic.” But she was among the pansies again.

“Mystic,” with the tone in his voice that she would never forget, “come back. Don’t you throw me over; I shall go to destruction if you do.”

“I can not help you. You do not try to help yourself.”

“I know it. I don’t want to be helped. I drift. I have no will to struggle. She plays with me like a cat with a mouse. I do not know what I am about half the time. I will take a double dose of morphine some night. I wonder if she would cry if she saw me dead. Men have done such things with less provocation; men of my temperament, too. Would you be sorry, Mystic?”

She stretched out her hands to take his hand in both hers: “Don’t talk so,” she said brokenly. “You know you do not mean it; why can’t you be brave and good? I didn’t know that men were so weak.”

“I am weak—I have strayed, I have wandered away—but I can go back.”

Long afterward she remembered these words; they, with his last “good-by, Mystic,” were all that she cared to remember among all the words that he had ever spoken to her.

She did not speak; she moved her fingers caressingly over his hand, thinking how pliant and feminine, how characteristic, it was.

“I know a woman’s heart,” he ran on lightly; “she is not a sacred mystery to me, as the fellows say in books. I dissected an old negro woman’s heart once; she died of enlargement of the heart, so that it was as much a study as the largest heart of her kind. Sue is going out to-night with Towne and his mother—it’s a pity that he wouldn’t step in now—she might let us all have a fair fight, and old Gesner, too, with his simpering voice! She would take Gesner only he doesn’t propose. ‘Thirty days hath September.’ I wish it had thirty thousand. When I was a youngster, and got a beating for not learning that, I little thought that one day I would learn it and count the days every night. Oh, that rare and radiant first of October! Do you know,” bending forward and lowering his tone, “that she is more than half inclined to throw him over?”

“She is never more than half inclined to do anything,” answered Tessa indignantly. “I wish that he were here to keep her out of mischief. Why do you stay so much with her? Surely you have business enough to keep you out of her presence.”

He laughed excitedly. “Keep a starving man away from bread when he has only to stretch out his hand and snatch it.”

“You have found that your doll is stuffed with sawdust, can’t you toss it aside?”

“I love sawdust,” he answered, comically.

“Then I’m ashamed of you.”

“You haven’t seen other men tried.”

“It is no honor to you to be thinking of her under existing circumstances.”

“I would run away with her to-night if she would run with me.”

“Then I despise you.”

“You love like a woman, Mystic; I love like a man.”

“I hope that no man will ever dishonor himself or dishonor me with love like that.”

As he stooped to pick up his glove, his breath swept her cheek; she started, almost exclaiming as she drew back, flushed and bewildered. He colored angrily, then laughed an excited, reckless laugh, and gathered the reins which had been hanging loose.

“Dr. Lake,” in a hurried, tremulous voice, “please don’t do that. Oh, why must you? Why can’t you be brave?” Her voice was choking with tears. “I did not think such a thing of you.”

“Of course you didn’t! But I will not do it again—I really will not. I am half mad as I told you. Good night, Mystic.”

“Good night,” she said sadly.

He held the reins still lingering.

“Will you ride with me again some day?”

“No, I don’t like to hear you talk.”

Again she went back to her pansies; the innocent pansies with their faint, pure breath were more congenial. As he drove under the maples, he muttered words that would have startled her as much as his tainted breath.

“Do you like it in this world, little pansies?” she sighed.

Her father laid his book within a window on the sill, and came down to her to talk about the buds of the day-lilies; her mother fanned herself with a palm-leaf fan and complained of the heat; Dinah ran down-stairs, fresh and airy in green muslin with a scarlet geranium among her curls, and after standing still to ask if she looked pretty, ran across to the planks to walk up and down with Norah Bird with their arms linked and their heads close together.

Tessa sighed again, remembering the old confidential talks with Laura when they both cared for the same things before she had outgrown Laura. There were so many things in her world to be sighed about to-night; the thought of Felix threw all her life into shadow; Norah and Dinah were laughing over some silly thing, and her mother was vigorously waving the fan and vigorously fretting at the heat and the dust in this same hour in which Felix—her bright, good Felix—was moaning out his feeble strength. She had not dared to ask Dr. Lake how he was; what comfort would it be to know that he was a little better or a little worse? How could she talk to him of her busy life and take him a copy of her book? She was counting the days, also; for in October her book would surely be out.

“You think more of that than you would of being married,” Dinah had said that day.

“So I do—than to be married to any one I know.”

“Do you expect to find somebody new?”

“Perhaps I do not expect to find any one at all,” she had answered.

“Oh, don’t be so dreary,” laughed Dinah.

Was that dreary? Once it might have seemed dreary; a year ago with what a smiting pain she would have echoed the word, but it was not a dreary prospect to-night as she stood with her father’s arm about her.

A new thing had happened to disturb her; Dinah was becoming shy and constrained in the presence of Mr. Hammerton; last summer she would run out to meet him, hang on his arm and chatter like a magpie; this summer she would oftener avoid him than move forward to greet him; this shamefacedness was altogether new and very becoming, yet the elder sister did not like it. There was no change in Mr. Hammerton, why should there be change in Dinah or in herself? He came no oftener than he had come last summer, he manifested no preference, sometimes she thought that this non-manifestation was too studied; gifts were brought to each, were it books or flowers. Did poor little Dine care for him, and was she so afraid of revealing it? Or, had she decided that it was for her sake that he came, and did she leave them so often together alone that it might be pleasanter for both? More than once or twice when he was expected, she had pleaded an engagement with Norah, and had not appeared until late in the evening.

“I wonder what’s got Dine,” their mother had remarked, “she seems possessed to run away from Gus.”

Their father had looked annoyed and exclaimed, “Nonsense, mother, nonsense.”

Tessa’s reverie was ended by Mr. Hammerton’s quick step upon the planks.

“He was here last night,” commented Mrs. Wadsworth as he crossed the street.

“Good evening, good people,” he said opening the gate. “You make quite a picture! If you had fruit and wine I should rub up my French or Spanish. I think that I am not too late; I did not hear until after tea that Professor Towne is to read tonight in Association Hall; some of your favorites, Lady Blue. Will you go, you and Dine?”

“Oh, yes, indeed; that is just what I want.”

“It is to be selections from ‘Henry V.,’ ‘The High Tide,’ ‘Locksley Hall,’ I think, and a few lighter things. You will think that you would rather elocute ‘The High Tide’ than even to have written it.”

“That is impossible. Did you tell Dine?”

“No, but I will. It was proper to ask the elder sister was it not?”

“I am not Leah,” said Tessa seriously, “call Rachel.”

“Rachel! Rachel!” he called, beckoning to Dinah. Dinah whistled by way of reply and dropped Norah’s arm.

“Have you brought me Mother Goose or a sugar-plum?” she asked lightly. “And why do you call me Rachel?”

“Don’t talk nonsense, children,” said Mr. Wadsworth very gravely. The color deepened in Mr. Hammerton’s cheeks and forehead as he met the old man’s grave eyes. “Mother, let’s you and I go too,” proposed Mr. Wadsworth, “we will imagine it to be twenty-seven years ago.”

“I only wish it was,” was the dissatisfied reply.

That evening was an event in Tessa’s quiet life: she heard no sound but the reader’s voice, she saw no face but his; she drew a long breath when the last words were uttered.

“Was it so good as all that?” whispered Mr. Hammerton. “You shall go to the Chapel with me next Sunday and hear him preach about ‘Meditation.’”

Dr. Towne, his mother, and Sue Greyson were seated near them; she did not observe the group until she arose to leave the hall.

“Wasn’t it stupid?” muttered Sue, catching at her sleeve. “And isn’t he perfectly elegant? Almost as elegant as the doctor.”

“You will not forget your promise?” Mrs. Towne said as Tessa turned towards her.

“Has Miss Tessa been making you a promise? She does not know how to break her word,” said Dr. Towne.

“You do not need to tell me that; her eyes are promise-keepers.”

Mrs. Towne kept her at her side until they reached the entrance and would have detained her until Professor Towne had made his way to them, had not Mr. Hammerton understood by the moving of her lips that she was not pleased and hurried her away.

“I hope that I shall never become acquainted with Professor Towne,” exclaimed Tessa nervously, as Mr. Hammerton drew her hand within his arm.

“Why not? I thought that you were wrapped up in him as the young ladies say.”

“Suppose I make a hole in him and find him stuffed with sawdust.”

“You could immediately retire into a convent.”

Dinah had mischievously fallen behind with her father and mother.

“Then I could never find my good man?”

“Must you find him or die forlorn?”

For several moments she found no answer: then the words came deliberately; “Perhaps I need not; I wonder why I thought there was a must in the matter; why may I not be happy and helpful without ending as good little girls do in fairy stories? I need not live or die forlorn—and yet—Gus, you are the only person in the whole world to whom I would confess that I would rather be like the good little girl in the fairy story! Please forget it.”

“It is too pleasant to forget,” he answered. “I do not want you to be too ambitious or too wise for the good old fashions of wife and mother!”

“How can any woman be that!” she exclaimed indignantly.

“May you never know.”

“What an easy time Eve had! All she had to do was to be led to Adam. She would not have chosen him a while afterward; he was altogether too much under her influence.”

“That weakness has become a part of our original sin.”

“It isn’t yours,” she retorted.

“Am I so different from other men?” he asked in a constrained voice.

“Most assuredly. I should as soon think of a whole row of encyclopedias falling in love.”

Mr. Hammerton was silent, for once repartee failed him.

Suddenly she asked, “Is your imagination a trial to you?”

“Haven’t you often told me that I am stupid as an old geometry.”

“And I hate geometry.”

“You read, you write, you live, you love through your imagination. You wrap the person you love in a rosy mist that is the breath of your hopeful heart, and you see your hero through that mist. Of course the mist fades and you have but the ugly outline—then, without stopping to see what God hath wrought, you cry out, ‘Oh, the horrible! the dreadful!’ and run away with your fingers in your ears.”

A few silent steps, then she said, “I deserve that. It is all true. Why did you not tell me before?”

“I left it to time and common sense.”

“It will take a great deal of both to make me sensible,” she answered humbly, and then added, “if suffering would root out my fancies—but I am like the child that tumbles and tumbles, and then tumbles again. I need to be guided by such a steady hand. Sometimes I do long so for somebody to do me good.”

Her companion’s silence might be sympathetic; as such she interpreted it, or she could not have said what she never ceased wondering at herself for saying—“I am not disappointed in love; but I am disappointed in loving. I thought that love was once and forever. Poets say so.”

“Yes, but we do not know how they live their poetry.”

“I know that my poetry fails me when extremity comes.”

“Has the extremity come?”

“Yes,” she said bravely.

“And that is another thing that I am not to know.”

“Not for five and fifty years. I will pigeon-hole all my experiences for you—if there is no one to object on my side or yours.”

“What about the reading? Was it all that you expected?”

“Wait a minute; call Dine before we talk it over.”

They had outwalked the others; Mr. Hammerton’s strides would not be pleasant to keep pace with in the long walk of life, as Dinah had once told him. It was a truth that no one recognized so well as himself, that he lacked the power of adaptation; he was too tall or too short, too broad or too narrow, too crooked or too straight for any niche in Dunellen, but the one that he had found in his boyhood by the snug, safe corner in the home where Dinah was growing up to entangle herself in his heart, and Tessa, lovable and wise, to enthrone herself in his intellect. In the game of forfeits, when he had been doomed to “Bow to the wittiest, kneel to the prettiest, and kiss the one you love the best,” in the long ago evenings, when they were all, old and young, children together, he had always bowed to Tessa and knelt to bewitching little Dine and kissed her. Now he bowed to Tessa, but he did not kiss Dine.

They stood waiting near a lamp-post; he, fidgeting as usual, she, straight and still.

“Lady Blue, you never put me on a pedestal, did you?”

“No, you never kept still long enough.”

Professor Towne passed them with Mrs. Towne leaning upon his arm; Mrs. Towne bowed and smiled, he lifted his hat in recognition of Tessa’s hesitating half inclination.

“Why, Tessa! Do you know him?”

“I almost spoke to him one day by mistake; I did not intend to bow, but he looked at me—I suppose the bow bowed itself.”

“He has a noble presence! He is altogether finer physically than his cousin.”

“I don’t know that he is,” she answered wilfully. Dinah came willingly enough; they walked more slowly and talked.

“Tessa,” began Dine abruptly as they were brushing their hair at bedtime, “isn’t Gus a fine talker?”

“Is he like Coleridge? He could talk four hours without interruption, but sometimes his listeners, learned men too, did not understand a word of it.”

“I do not always understand Gus.”

“Gus does not ramble; he is plain enough.”

Dine brushed out a long curl and looked down upon it. “I shall ask him to give me a list of books that I ought to read.”

“I confess that while I understand what he says I do not understand him. If you do, you are wiser than I.”

“I guess that I am wiser than you.”

“I used to think that I understood people; I have come to the conclusion that I do not understand even my own self.”

“Do you like garnet? I want a garnet in some material this winter. Gus says that I am a butterfly.”

“Yes, you are pretty in warm colors.”

Tessa drew a chair to the open window and sat a long time leaning her elbows on the sill with her face towards the Harrison Homestead. Felix had always been so proud of the old house with its tiled chimney-pieces, with its ancient crockery brought from Holland and the iron bound Bible with the names of his ancestors; for two hundred years the place had been held in the Harrison name, a great-great-grandfather having purchased the land from the Indians. He had said once to her, “I have a good old honest name to give to you, Tessa.” She would have worn his name worthily for his sake; if it might be,—but her father would hold her back,—why should she not sacrifice herself? Was not Felix worthy of her devotion? What other grander thing could she ever do? The moon was rising; she changed her position to watch it and did not leave it until it stood high above the apple orchard.