The two walked down the shaded steps, Sylvia watching them admiringly, the scene forever printed on her memory, and emerged into the pool of sunshine where she sat, swinging her legs from the bench.  They stood there for some minutes, talking together in low tones.  Sylvia, absorbed in watching the play of light on Aunt Victoria’s smooth cheek, heard but a few words of what passed between them.  She had a vague impression that Professor Saunders continually began sentences starting firmly with “But” and ending somehow on quite another note.  She felt dimly that Aunt Victoria was less calmly passive than usual in a conversation, that it was not only the enchanting rising and falling inflections of her voice which talked, but her eyes, her arms, her whole self.  Once she laid her hand for an instant on Professor Saunders’ arm.

More than that Sylvia could not remember, even when she was asked later to repeat as much as she could of what she had heard.  She was resolving when she was grown-up to have a ruffle of creamy lace falling away from her neck and wrists as Aunt Victoria did.  She had not only forgotten Arnold’s story, she had forgotten that such a boy existed.  She was living in a world all made up of radiance and bloom, lace and sunshine and velvet, and bright hair and gleaming cloth and smooth voices and the smell of violets.

After a time she was aware that Professor Saunders shook hands and turned back up the steps.  Aunt Victoria began to move with her slow grace along the road towards home, and Sylvia to follow, soaking herself in an impression of supreme suavity.

When, after the walk through the beech-woods, they reached the edge of the Marshall field, they saw a stiff plume of blue smoke stand up over the shack by the garden and, as they approached, heard a murmur of voices.  Mrs. Marshall-Smith stopped, furled her parasol, and surveyed the scene within.  Her sister-in-law, enveloped in a large blue apron, by no means fresh, sat beside a roughly built table, peeling tomatoes, her brown stained fingers moving with the rapidity of a prestidigitator’s.  Judith stood beside her, also attacking the pile of crimson fruit, endeavoring in vain to emulate her mother’s speed.  Over the hot, rusty stove hung Arnold, red-faced and bright-eyed, armed with a long, wooden spatula which he continually dug into the steaming contents of an enormous white-lined kettle.  As, at the arrival of the new-comers, Mrs. Marshall’s voice stopped, he looked around and frowned impatiently at his stepmother.  “She’s just got to the excitin’ part,” he said severely, and to the raconteur eagerly, “’N’en what?”