Two days later David Rand came out of the mists of anesthesia in a hospital room, feeling very strange, his back an aching soreness. Doctor White and Ruth were bending over his bed.
"Well, it was a complete success, young man," said the doctor. "You'll be out of here in a few days."
Ruth's eyes were shining. "The day you leave, David, we'll be married."
When they were gone, David slowly felt his back. Only the bandaged, projecting stumps of his wings remained. He could move the great wing-muscles, but no whirring pinions answered. He felt dazed and strange, as though some most vital part of him was gone. But he clung to the thought of Ruth—of Ruth waiting for him
And she was waiting for him, and they were married on the day he left the hospital. And in the sweetness of her love, David lost all of that strange dazed feeling, and almost forgot that once he had possessed wings and had roamed the sky a wild, winged tiling.
Wilson hall gave his daughter and son-in-law a pretty white cottage on a wooded hill near town, and made a place for David in his business and was patient with his ignorance of commercial matters. And every day David drove his car into town and worked all day in his office and drove back homeward in the dusk to sit with Ruth before their fire, her head on his shoulder.
"David, are you sorry that you did it?" Ruth would ask anxiously at first.
And he would laugh and say, "Of course not, Ruth. Having you is worth anything."
And he told himself that that was true, that he did not regret the loss of his wings. All that past time when he had flown the sky with whirring wings seemed only a strange dream and only now had he awakened to real happiness, he assured himself.
Wilson Hall told his daughter, "David's doing well down at the office. I was afraid he would always be a little wild, but he's settled down fine."
Ruth nodded happily and said, "I knew that he would. And everyone likes him so much now."
For people who once had looked askance at Ruth's marriage now remarked that it had turned out very well after all.
"He's really quite nice. And except for the slight humps on his shoulders, you'd never think that he had been different from anyone else," they said.
So the months slipped by. In the little cottage on the wooded hill was complete happiness until there came the fall, frosting the lawn with silver each morning, stamping crazy colors on die maples.
One fall night David woke suddenly, wondering what had so abruptly awakened him. Ruth was still sleeping softly with gentle breathing beside him. He could hear no sound.
Then he heard it. A far-away, ghostly whistling trailing down from the frosty sky, a remote, challenging shrilling that throbbed with a dim, wild note of pulsing freedom.
He knew what it was, instantly. He swung open the window and peered up into the night with beating heart. And up there he saw them, long, streaming files of hurtling wild birds, winging southward beneath the stars. In an instant the wild impulse to spring from the window, to rocket up after them into the clean, cold night, clamored blindly in David's heart.
Instinctively the great wing-muscles at his back tensed. But only the stumps of his wings moved beneath his pajama jacket.
