had kept ready. "He'll sleep better," her mother said. "I fear he'll wake in the night, hungry."
But Ellen wanted him left to sleep, so her mother stole in, while Ellen held a lamp outside the door, and her mother was satisfied to draw over him a blanket, for the cool of the northern night had come. Ellen had a glimpse of him in a shaft of light from the lamp she held—a glimpse of his brown head and his arms flung beside his head, like a child sleeping, face to the bed. He never stirred.
She retreated, at last, to her room where she lay listening and dreaming, with sleepless suspense, in the dark. It was almost like her dream of him with her under shade trees; better than her dream, in some ways, to have him here. But what did it mean that, seeing her, he had leaped to her boat? What did it mean that he was here? In the dark she listened for sound of stir from him, happy and fluttering with fright. Happy? Never, never in all her life had she suspected happiness like this; and never, this fright.
Cockcrow awakened Jay; cockcrow and the clear, slanting shafts of the northern sunrise. It was later than dawn, for the house was on the west slope and the sun had to surmount the hilltop before sending its yellow beams through the windows. Jay stretched and he studied the white ceiling. He looked through one window and saw the strait; through another and he gazed upon a garden sparkling with dew: blue larkspur and Canterbury bells and, beside the window, purple and white and pink morning-glory. Cockcrow and the cluck of hens.
