Mrs. Yarrow waited self-respectfully for her disappearance, and then she said, “I’m afraid that was a hint, Mr. Alford.”

“It seemed like one,” he owned.

They went out together, gayly chatting, but she would not encourage the movement he made towards the veranda.  She remained firmly attached to the newel-post of the stairs, and at the first chance he gave her she said good-night and bounded lightly upward.  At the turn of the stairs she stopped and looked laughing down at him over the rail.  “I hope you won’t see your grandmother.”

“Oh, not a bit of it,” he called back.  He felt that he failed to give his reply the quality of epigram, but he was not unhappy in his failure.

Many light-hearted days followed this joyous evening.  No eidolons haunted Alford’s horizon, perhaps because Mrs. Yarrow filled his whole heaven.  She was very constantly with him, guiding his wavering steps up the hill of recovery, which he climbed with more and more activity, and keeping him company in those valleys of relapse into which he now and then fell back from the difficult steeps.  It came to be tacitly, or at least passively, conceded by the other ladies that she had somehow earned the exclusive right to what had once been the common charge; or that if one of their number had a claim to keep Mr. Alford from killing himself by all sorts of imprudences, which in his case amounted to impieties, it was certainly Mrs. Yarrow.  They did not put this in terms, but they felt it and acted it.

She was all the safer guardian for a delicate invalid because she loathed manly sports so entirely that she did not even pretend to like them, as most women, poor things, think themselves obliged to do.  In her hands there was no danger that he would be tempted to excesses in golf.  She was really afraid of all boats, but she was willing to go out with him in the sail-boat of a superannuated skipper, because to sit talking in the stern and stoop for the vagaries of the boom in tacking was such good exercise.  She would join him in fishing from the rotting pier, but with no certainty which was a cunner and which was a sculpin, when she caught it, and with an equal horror of both the nasty, wriggling things.  When they went a walk together, her notion of a healthful tramp was to find a nice place among the sweet-fern or the pine-needles, and sit down in it and talk, or make a lap, to which he could bring the berries he gathered for her to arrange in the shallow leaf-trays she pinned together with twigs.  She really preferred a rocking-chair on the veranda to anything else; but if he wished to go to those other excesses, she would go with him, to keep him out of mischief.

There could be only one credible reading of the situation, but Alford let the summer pass in this pleasant dreaming without waking up till too late to the pleasanter reality.  It will seem strange enough, but it is true, that it was no part of his dream to fancy that Mrs. Yarrow was in love with him.  He knew very well, long before the end, that he was in love with her; but, remaining in the dark otherwise, he considered only himself in forbearing verbally to make love to her.