Lee Greenfield was waiting at the gate for Caroline.

Just as Henrietta had taken a last peep at the clock on the hall table and gone to answer Sallie’s call to come and help Aunt Dilsie in the bedding of the Kitten and the Pup, Polk’s Hupp stopped at the gate, and he and Jane came up the front walk in the twilight together.

She had on his flannel coat over her linen one and his expression was one of glorified and translucent daze.  I didn’t look at her—­I felt as if I couldn’t.  I was scared!  For a second she held me in her arms and kissed me, really—­the first time she had ever done it in all my life—­and then went on upstairs with a nice, cool good-night and “thank you” to Polk.

“Evelina,” he said, as he handed me the empty lunch-basket and also the empty fish-bucket, the first he had ever in his life brought in from Little Harpeth, “I was right about that Hallelujah chorus being the true definition of the real woman—­only they are more so.  I have seen a light, and you pointed the way.  Will you forgive me for being what I was—­and trust me—­with—­with—­good-night!” He was gone!

Jane’s kiss had been one of revelation—­to me!

For a long time I sat out there in the cool, hazy, windy autumn twilight breeze, that was heavy with the scent of luscious wild grapes and tasseled corn, fanning the flame of loneliness in me until I couldn’t have stood it any longer if a tall gray figure of relief had not come up the street and called me down to my front gate.

“Hail the instigator of a bloodless revolution,” laughed the Crag as I stopped myself with difficulty on the opposite side of the gate from him.  “The city fathers will have to capitulate, and now for the reign of the mothers!”

“And the same old route to subjection chosen, through their stomachs to their civic hearts,” I answered impudently.

Overlooking my pertness he went on: 

“Mayor Shelby was at home with Mrs. Augusta for two hours after dinner and, as I came by the post-office, I heard him telling Polk in remarkably chastened, if not entirely chaste language, that it was ’better to let the women have their kick-up on a feeding proposition than on something worse,’ as he classically put it.”

“I know it is a great victory,” I answered weakly, “but I’m too tired to glory in it.  I wish I was Sallie’s Puppy being trotted across Aunt Dilsie’s knee, or Kit, getting a rocking in Cousin Martha’s arms.”

“Would any other arms do for the rocking?” came in a queer, audacious voice, with a note in it that stilled something in me and made all the world seem to be holding its breath.

“I’m tired of revoluting and it’s—­it’s tenderness I want,” I faltered in a voice that hardly seemed strong enough to get so far up out of my heart as to reach the ears of the Crag as he bent his head down close over mine.  He had come on my side of the gate at the first weak little cry I had let myself make a minute or two before.