He was, it happened, the first person the child encountered in her flight across the field; the others, indistinguishable at that distance, were in a group a little farther away.  Mary walked out to meet him when she saw him coming toward her and competently gave the encounter its tone by beginning to talk to him—­about how hot it was and how nice the hay smelled and how good it seemed to be back here at Hickory Hill—­while they were still a good twenty paces apart.  You couldn’t strike any sort of sentimental note very well when you had to begin at a shout.  Then she led him back to the lemonade, gave him a cigarette and answered at length and with a good deal of spontaneous vivacity his obligatory questions about Paula and the opening of the Ravinia season.

She was in the full tide of this—­and was, since she had sat down upon a small boulder Graham had insisted she take possession of, screened by the trunk of the tree—­when Sylvia hailed her brother from, not very far away with the statement that Rush wouldn’t stop for anything or anybody until once more around the field.  It was March, then, who was audibly coming along with her.  Mary rose, broke off about Paula, and moved the single step it needed to give her sight of him.

She saw nothing else but him.  She saw his head go back as from the actual impact of the sight of her.  She saw the look, unmistakable as a blast from a trumpet, that flamed into his face.  And then her world swam.  Paula wasn’t singing now, “Hither, my love!  Here I am!  Here!” Nor could Paula come upon him now, from anywhere, and take him by the shoulders and kiss his cheek and lead him away with her.  This moment was not Paula’s—­whatever the other had been.

And the rest, standing there looking on, hadn’t seen the bolt fall!  They were talking as idly and easily as if this were nothing but a hot summer afternoon in the hay field.

“I told him,” she heard Sylvia saying, “that there was another nice old person he knew here with the lemonade, who thought I was only about six.—­Were you surprised when you saw who she was?—­I’m going to take him back to the apple house with us, now that Mary’s come, so that he can have the piano ready to dance by to-night.”  This last, apparently, to Graham.

She even heard herself join in,—­the voice was hers anyhow—­when Graham, commenting upon the view across the field, remarked that it was so intensely farm-like that it had almost the look of a stage setting.

“It is like something,” she said then.  “It’s like the first act of Le Chemineau.  We ought to have a keg of cider instead of two jugs of lemonade and we should have brought it in a wheelbarrow instead of in the Ford.”

“Well, we couldn’t take Mr. March back in a wheelbarrow,” Sylvia said, “so I’m glad it isn’t the first act of whatever-you-call-it.  Because he’s simply got to fix the piano well enough for jazz.”

Mary couldn’t remember that he spoke a word, but he got into the back seat of the Ford with her when Sylvia slid under the wheel.