He was holding himself, obviously, on a very tight rein, and it was quite conceivable that before her visit ended, he would bolt.  There was a moment, indeed—­when he came with Rush to supper at the apple house and got his first look at the transformation she had wrought in it—­when that possibility must have been in the minds of every one who saw his face.

She had dramatized the result of her two days’ labor innocent of any intention to produce an effect like that.  The partners when they came dropping in from time to time had, learned nothing of her plans, seen none of their accomplishments, so to-night the old-fashioned settle which Bill had knocked together from lumber in the packing room and she had stained, two of the sorting tables, fitted into the corners beside the fireplace to make a dais, the conversion of another into a capital dining table by the simple expedient of lengthening its legs, the rag rug, discovered in the village, during a flying trip with Sylvia this morning in her car and ravished from the church fair it had been intended for, the sacks of sheeting Aunt Lucile had been sewing industriously all day, covered with burlaps and stuffed with hay to serve as cushions, the cheese-cloth tacked up in gathers over the windows and hemmed with pins,—­all this, revealed at once, had the surprise of a conjurer’s trick, or, if one were predisposed that way, the entrancement of a miracle.

She was a little entranced, herself, partly with fatigue for she had put in, one after the other, two unusually laborious days, but partly no doubt with her own magic, with this almost convincing simulation of a home which she and her assistants had produced.  It didn’t matter that she had gone slack and silent, because Sylvia, who just before supper had shown a disposition to dreamy elegiac melancholy, rebounded, as soon as she was filled with food, to the other end of the scale altogether and swept Rush after her into a boisterous romp, which none of Aunt Lucile’s remonstrant asides to her nephew was effectual to quell.

She was an amazing creature, this product of the latest generation to begin arriving at the fringes of maturity, a reedy young thing, as tall as Graham, inches taller than Rush.  She had the profile of a young Greek goddess and the grin of a gamin.  She was equally at home in a ballgown—­though she was not yet out—­or in a pair of khaki riding breeches and an olive drab shirt.  She was capable of assuming a manner that was a genuine gratification to her great aunt or one that startled her father’s stable men.  She read French novels more or less at random, (unknown to her mother.  She had a rather mischievous uncle who was responsible for this development) and she was still deadly accurate with a snowball.  A bewildering compound of sophistications and innocence, a modern young sphinx with a riddle of her own.