The afternoon had been saturated with emotional excitement and the moment had come for its inevitable crystallization into fateful words.  The man spoke as though he were not wholly conscious of what he was saying.  He stepped beside her like one in a dream.  He could not take his eyes from her, from her flushed, grave, receptive face, from her downcast, listening eyes, her slow, trance-like step as she waited for him to go on.  He went on:  “It becomes, my dear, I assure you—­the idea of that possibility becomes absolutely an obsession—­even to a man usually quite his own master—­”

They were almost at a standstill now, and the two in front of them had reached the house.  Sylvia had a moment of what seemed to her the purest happiness she had ever known....

From across the lawn they saw a violent gesture—­Molly had thrown her grandfather’s clinging hand from her, and flashed back upon the two, lingering there in the sunlight.  She cast herself on Sylvia, panting and trying to laugh.  Her little white teeth showed in what was almost a grimace.  “Why in the world are you two poking along so?” she cried, passing her arm through Sylvia’s.  Her beautiful sunny head came no more than to Sylvia’s shoulder.  Without waiting for an answer she went on hurriedly, speaking in the tones of suppressed excitement which thrilled in every one’s voice that day:  “Come on, Sylvia—­let’s work it off together!  Let me take you somewhere—­let’s go to Rutland and back.”

“That’s thirty miles away!” said Sylvia, “and it’s past five now.”

“I’ll have you there and back long before seven,” asserted Molly.  “Come on ... come on ...”  She pulled impatiently, petulantly at the other girl’s arm.

“I’m not invited, I suppose,” said Morrison, lighting a cigarette with care.

Molly looked at him a little wildly.  “No, Felix, you’re not invited!” she said, and laughed unsteadily.

She had hurried them along to the car, and now they stood by the swift gray machine, Molly’s own, the one she claimed to love more than anything else in the world.  She sprang in and motioned Sylvia to the seat beside her.

“Hats?” suggested Morrison, looking at their bare, shining heads.  He was evidently fighting for time, manoeuvering for an opening.  His success was that of a man gesticulating against a gale.  Molly’s baldly unscrupulous determination beat down the beginnings of his carefully composed opposition before he could frame one of his well-balanced sentences.  “No—­no—­it takes too long to go and get hats!” she cried peremptorily.  “If you can’t have what you want when you want it, it’s no use having it at all!”

“I’m not sure,” remarked Morrison, “that Miss Marshall wants this at all.”

“Yes, she does; yes, she does!” Molly contradicted him heatedly.  Sylvia, hanging undecided at the step, felt herself pulled into the car; the door banged, the engine started with a smooth sound of powerful machinery, the car leaped forward.  Sylvia cast one backward glance at Morrison, an annoyed, distinguished, futile presence, standing motionless, and almost instantly disappearing in the distance in which first he, and then the house and tall poplars over it, shrank to nothingness.