He tramped on and on, humming snatches of poetry, or meaningless singsongs of his own invention, feeling as happy as if he had been taken into the divine conspiracy and knew the solution of all the dissonances. It was as wonderful and secret as birth… . The word turned his mind to Laura Lou. How queer if she were going to have a child! He tried to imagine how life would arrange itself, with two people to feed, nurse, clothe, provide for—oh, curse that everlasting obstacle! He didn't even know how Laura Lou and he were going to face the winter alone. If she were to have a child he supposed they must humble their pride and accept his father's hospitality. But he did not want to dwell on that. Things were so right as they were. The bungalow in the apple orchard was just the place for him to dream and work in, and as for Laura Lou, she was happy, she was herself, for the first time since their marriage. Her domestic training had been rudimentary, and she was heedless and improvident, and sometimes—often—too tired to finish what she had begun. But now that she had her husband and her house to herself she atoned for every deficiency by a zeal that outran her strength and a good-humour that never flagged. In New York she used to sit for hours by the chilly radiator without speaking or moving, to listless to tidy up, leaving her clothes unmended, shelves and drawers in a litter; now she was always stirring about, sweeping, mending, washing. She even began to concern herself with the adornment of the rooms, wheedled out of Vance embroidered covers for their pillows and surprised him one evening by a bunch of wild flowers on the supper table. "I guess that was the way the table was fixed the day we lunched with the Tarrants," she said, with a reminiscent smile; and Vance laughed and declared: "Their flowers weren't anything like as pretty." Often now he heard her singing at her work, till her silence told him she had interrupted it to drop down in the kitchen rocker while the wave of weariness swept over her… . Poor Laura Lou! These months in the bungalow had made her intelligible to him, and turned his pity back to tenderness. After all, perhaps she was the kind of wife an artist ought to have… .

He reached the wood, climbed to a ledge from which he could catch the distant blue of the Sound, and stretched out in the sun with his bread and cheese and his dream… . Certainly the book must be called Magic… .