“If you’ll promise,” Sylvia said to March at the end of the breathless mile back to the apple house, “if you’ll promise to go straight to work at it and never stop until it’ll play the Livery Stable Blues, then I’ll go back to the hay field and see that Rush gets some of the lemonade before those laborers drink it all up.  You’ll see to him, won’t you, Mary?  Stand right over him and be severe, so that we can dance to-night.  You aren’t as excited about it as you ought to be.  I think I’ll come in and start him.”

And this she did while the Ford executed a little jazz rhythm of its own outside.  She didn’t stay more than a minute or two though.  When she saw him fairly occupied, tools in hand, over his task, she darted away again with a last injunction to severity upon Mary.

She had seen nothing.  The two were left alone.

Mary sat where she could watch his fine skilled hands at work.  The negligent precision with which they accomplished their varied tasks occupied her, made it possible to continue for a while the silence she needed until her world should have stopped swimming; until the blindness of that revelation should have passed.

She had been wrong about him again.  He was not an Olympian. (But, of course, Olympians themselves weren’t, if it came to that; not always.) He could never, she had been telling herself since that day when they had had their one talk together, belong to any one.  He did not—­save himself up for special people.  He was just there, the same for everybody, like, she had half humorously observed to her father, a public drinking fountain.

If that was the rule, she, Mary Wollaston, was the exception to it.  Not Paula with her opulent armory, but she who had listened with him, clinging to him, while Paula sang; she, who had talked to him while Paula fought for her husband’s life; she, whom he had come upon in the shade of the oak tree at the edge of the hay field; she who sat near him, silent now.  This was the meager total that outweighed those uncounted hours of Paula’s.  Somehow she had acquired a special significance for him.

Was she trying to evade saying that he had fallen in love with her.  What was the good—­except that it sounded sweet—­of using a phrase which could be packed like a hand-bag with anything you chose to put into it?  Graham was in love with her.  That boy in New York, whom she had found in a panic of lonely terror lest he should prove a coward in the great ordeal he was facing overseas had been for a few hours in love with her.  What would be the content of the phrase for a man like this?

Was she in love with him?  Her thoughts up to now had been deep, submerged, almost formless, but this question came to the surface and touched her lips with a smile.  Well, and what did the phrase mean to her?

All she could think of as she sat so still watching him, was those fine hands of his, working as skillfully and swiftly as her father’s ever worked but at this humble task.  She kept her eyes away for just a little longer from his face.  She wanted those hands.  She wanted them with an intensity that made it impossible at last to let the silence endure any longer.