Toward eleven o’clock chance befriended her.  She hid herself in the old orchard, lay prone upon the warm grass, her cheek upon her folded forearms, and let herself go.  She did not cry even now.  Grief was not what she felt, still less resentment.

She was lonely as she had never been before, and frightened by her loneliness.  All the familiar things of her life seemed far away, unreal.  She wanted a hand to hold;—­his—­oh, one of his!—­until she could find her way into a path again.

She had known, she reflected,—­somewhere in the depths of her she had known—­from the first moment of their meeting, that he would go away.  This was why she had been so careful not to look beyond the moments as they came; not to tempt Nemesis by asking nor trying for too much.

There happened to be, rather uncannily, a genuine proof that this was true.  While she had been still dazed with that first look of his, there in the oak shade at the edge of the field, she had said that it was like the first act of Le Chemineau.  That had been speaking all but with the tongue of prophecy.  Deeply as the story had impressed her when she heard it, she had spoken with no conscious sense of the likeness between that wayfarer—­whom neither love nor interest nor security could tempt away from the open road which called him,—­and Anthony March.  It was an inner self that knew and found a chance to speak.  It was that same self who had answered for her when he asked whether she wanted him to come to Ravinia.

He had come to his decision then, with just that nod of the head.  And she, forlorn, was glad he had cast this temptation aside.  That he was plodding now sturdily along his highway.  She flushed with shame at the thought of him, ubiquitous among those egotists at Ravinia, enlisting their interest, reminding Paula how much she liked him.

Why had he not hated her for suggesting such a thing?  He had loved her for it, she knew, because he understood the longing to comfort and protect him which lay behind it.  But that sort of comfort was not for him.  The torture of the unheard melodies, instead.

He did love her.  This, utterly, she knew.  His going away, even with no farewell at all, cast no flaw upon the miraculous certainty of that.  Their one unreserved embrace remained the symbol of it.

She pressed her hands to her face and with a long indrawn breath surrendered to the memory of it.  It was hers—­for always.

The family were sitting at dinner when she came down to the apple house, and after a rather startled look at her, demanded to know where she had been.

“Asleep in the orchard,” she said.  “And not altogether awake yet.”

But she knew she must get away from them.  The look she saw in Graham’s face would have decided that.

CHAPTER XVIII

A CASE OF NECESSITY

She told Rush when they left the table, that she had some shopping to do in town for Paula and meant to go on the afternoon train.  She was expected back at Ravinia to-morrow anyhow.  Beyond trying to persuade her to let Pete drive her in he made no protest, but she could see that he was troubled about it and she wasn’t much surprised to find Wallace Hood waiting on the station platform when her train got in.