Once, too, he had dreamed of waking cold in the middle of the night and
finding just a spark on the ashes of his hearth. This he nursed to
flame; the flame sprang up waist-high, hot and yellow. Fearful, he beat
it down to a spark again. But then again he was cold. He puffed at this
spark, shivering; the flame grew, and this time, with all he could do,
it shot up into the rafters of his house and devoured it.--
So it was that the passion of Cad Sills lived with him still.
He taught the child her letters with blue shells, and later to take the
motion of his lips for words. She waylaid him everywhere--on the rocks,
on the sands, in the depths of the hemlock grove, on tiny antlers of
gray caribou moss, with straggling little messages and admonishings of
love. Her apron pocket was never without its quota of these tiny shells
of brightest peacock blue. They trailed everywhere. He ground them under
heel at the threshold of his house. From long association they came to
stand for so many inquisitive little voices in themselves, beseeching,
questioning, defying.
But for his part, he grew to have a curious belief, even when her head
was well above his shoulder, that the strong arch of her bosom must ring
out with wild sweet song one day, like that which he had heard on the
November hillside, when Caddie Sills had run past him at the Preaching
Tree.
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