The Mulberry Bush by Helen Topping Miller Page A

nodded. “How about driving up with me on Sunday? The place is historic but it isn’t entirely a ghost town any more. There’s quite a lot of activity—not so much excitement as when they paved the street with silver bricks for Ulysses Grant’s carriage to roll over, but it isn’t a place of memories entirely, now.”
    â€œToo bad. Some of our very best literature will have to be rewritten. And it was very effective material too—the lure of the dramatic past. Did you do that, with your dynamite?”
    â€œThe man who invented a way to pump water up eight thousand feet did most of it. Most of those high mining projects failed for lack of water, originally. Then the water came, and good roads, and some of them are slowly coming back again. Not to their roaring pasts—but to a comfortable present.”
    â€œHow Mike would love all this!” Virginia was thinking. And she made up another letter to him in her mind, a letter that was not written for days, because she had so much to do. But at last Sunday came.

Chapter 6
    She had gone up Pike’s Peak, and on the way had missed most of the view because she had to count the number of seats in the cog-wheel cars and the buses. She had been driven up a dizzy ascent to a quiet brow where a tower and a carillon and bronze tablets kept alive the memory of Will Rogers, and she had had little chance to explore, because she had had to argue endlessly with the proprietor of a lunch place about box lunches for next summer. She had sat in the offices of hotel managers and listened, though Teresa had cautioned her against that.
    â€œDon’t let them get started on their sales talk. They’ll recite whole pages from their folders, and then, when you’re completely numb and past resisting, they’ll end up by sticking another dollar on the rate.”
    On the whole she had done very well, as well as Teresa had done the previous year. She had been weary at night, glad to lie in a hot tub, fragrant with pine salts, glad to wrap herself in a silk negligée and stretch out on the bed with a book, after the interminable reports to Washington had been dropped down the mail chute. And twice at night she had been too tired to write a letter to Mike.
    There had been no letters from him, of course. She had left in such haste that she had had no chance to arrange for the forwarding of her personal mail. She mailed Mike’s letters in care of Bill Foster and realized that they might not reach Mike for days, perhaps not for weeks. They might even follow him about and never catch up with him at all. Mike had told her how he might go—pack-train, burro, on foot.
    â€œHow will he look when I see him again?”
    Would there be a self-conscious stiffness, a strangeness? Would they meet awkwardly, struggling to recapture old ground again, rapture past, dreams shared, that gossamer fabric of love they had woven together? Or would the same radiance clothe them again—the same ecstasy sing in their hearts, the same eager gladness spring into their eyes?
    â€œWe had so little time,” she thought anxiously. “So little time for love to grow!”
    Like planting a fragile and lovely flower and then rushing away, trusting to time and the weather to water the delicate roots.
    â€œIt mustn’t die,” she told her pillow in a brief surge of midnight panic. “It mustn’t die!”
    Daylight brought calm and a quiet feeling of amusement for her fears. How could love die—for people who loved as she loved Mike? How Mike would laugh if ever she confessed to him the silly fears she had conjured out of thin air.
    â€œGinny, you nutty—Ginny, you silly angel!”
    And then, though she fought it down furiously, would come again that wincing uncertainty, returning as a bitter taste returns to the tongue, as pain returns in the morning. That black-haired girl—had she, too, thought that love lived