I was positively nervous over the prospect of his embarrassment when he should catch sight of me, but there was none.

“Eve!” he exclaimed, with surprise, and a ray of pure delight drove away the dreams in his eyes.  Nobody in the wide world calls me Eve but just the Crag, and he does it in a queer, still way when he is surprised to see me, or glad, or sorry, or moved with any kind of sudden emotion.

And queer as it is I have to positively control the desire to answer him with the correlated title—­Adam!

“I forgot to tell you yesterday that I was coming over to get the slugs for you, dear,” he said as he came down the row of roses next to mine, squatted opposite to where I was kneeling by the bushy, suffering Neron and began to examine the under side of each leaf carefully.  He was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in the early light with his great chest bare and the blue of the pajamas melting into the bronze of his throat and calling out the gray in his eyes.  I had to force myself into being gardener rather than artist, as we laughed together over the glass bowl and silver spoon I had brought out for the undoing of the slugs.  Some day I’m going to paint him like that!

[Illustration:  His gray eyes were positively mysterious with interrupted dreams]

I found out about the pajamas from questioning Aunt Martha discreetly.  They seemed so incongruous in relation to the usual old Henry Clay coat and stock collar, that I had to know the reason why.  Mrs. Hargrove’s son was a very worldly man, she says, and wore them.  It comforts her to make them for the Crag to wear in memoriam.  He wears the collars Cousin Martha makes him with her own fingers after the pattern she made his father’s by, for the same reason, and lets Cousin Jasmine cut his hair because she always cut her father’s, Colonel Horton’s, until his death.  That accounts for the ante-bellum curls and the irregular tags in the back.  I almost laughed when Cousin Martha was telling me, but I remembered how a glow rose in my heart when I saw that he still had Father’s little old Confederate comrade tailor cut his coats on the same pattern on which he had cut Father’s, since the days of reconstruction.  Sometimes it startles me to find that with all my emancipation I am very like other women.

But I wonder what I would do if Sallie attired him in any of the late Henry’s wearing apparel?

“What do you suppose is the why of such useless things as slugs?” I speculated to stop that thought off sharp as we crawled down the row together, he searching one side of each bush and I the other.

“Well, they brought on this nice companionable hunt for them, didn’t they?” he asked, looking over into my eyes with a laugh.

“I wanted to see you early this morning anyway,” he hastily resumed.  “Sallie and the Dominie sat talking to you so late last night that I didn’t feel it was fair to come across after they left.  But I wanted you so I could hardly get to sleep, and I was just half awake from a dream of you, when I came into the garden.”