But after this, with an abrupt shift to another plane, “That would be acting preposterously, like a silly, self-consciously virtuous matron.  What earthly difference does it make to me what a casual visitor to our town says or does to amuse himself in his casual stay, that may end at any moment?  And how scarifyingly he would laugh at me, if he knew what comic relics of old prudish reflexes are stirred up by the contact with his mere human livingness.  Heavens!  How he would laugh to know me capable of being so ‘guindee,’ so personal, fearing like any school-girl a flirtation in any man’s conversation.  He must never see a trace of that.  No matter how startled I ever am, he mustn’t see anything but a smooth, amused surface.  It would be intolerable to have him laugh at me.”

Her hand was on the latch, when a deep, muffled murmur from the depths admonished her, “Personal vanity . . . that’s what’s at the bottom of all that you are telling yourself.  It is a vain woman speaking, and fearing a wound to her vanity.”

She resented this, pushed it back, and clicked the latch up firmly, stepping out into the transparent gold of the late-afternoon sunshine.  She turned her head as her companion came up behind her on the garden path, half expecting to have his eyes meet hers with a visible shade of sardonic mockery, and prepared to meet it halfway with a similar amusement at the absurdity of human beings, herself included.

* * * * *

He was not looking at her at all, but straight before him, unconscious for an instant that she had turned her eyes on him, and in this instant before the customary mask of self-consciousness dropped over his face, she read there, plain and startling to see, unmistakable to her grown woman’s experience of life, the marks of a deep, and painful, and present emotion.

All of her hair-splitting speculations withered to nothing.  She did not even wonder what it was that moved him so strangely and dreadfully.  There was no room for thought in the profound awed impersonal sympathy which with a great hush came upon her at the sight of another human being in pain.

He felt some intimate emanation from her, turned towards her, and for the faintest fraction of time they looked at each other through a rent in the veil of life.

* * * * *

Cousin Hetty’s old voice called them cheerfully, “Over here, this way under the willow-tree.”

They turned in that direction, to hear her saying, “. . . that was in 1763 and of course they came on horseback, using the Indian trails the men had learned during the French-and-Indian wars.  Great-grandmother (she was a twelve-year-old girl then) had brought along a willow switch from their home in Connecticut.  When the whole lot of them decided to settle here in the valley, and her folks took this land to be theirs, she stuck her willow switch into the ground, alongside the brook here, and this is the tree it grew to be.  Looks pretty battered up, don’t it, like other old folks.”