Neale permitted himself no comment on this, nor showed the alteration of a line in his face as he stepped into the car and turned on the switch, but Marise cried out to him accusingly, “You might as well say it right out, that you can support life if it is.”

Neale laughed a little and put his foot on the starter.  “Get in the back seat, Paul,” was all he said, as the little boy came up silently from the other side of the station.

He added as they started up the hill road, “First time in my life I was ever sort of sorry for Eugenia.  It seemed to me this morning that she was beginning to show her age.”

Marise hid the fact that she had had the same idea and opposed, “Eugenia would laugh at that from you, the husband of such a frankly middle-aged thing as I.”

Neale was silent for a moment, and then, “You’ll always look younger than she.  No, not younger, that’s not it, at all.  It’s living, you look.  I tell you what, she’s a cut flower in a vase, that’s beginning to wilt, and you’re a living plant.”

“Why, Neale!” said Marise, astonished and touched.

“Yes, quite a flight of fancy for me, wasn’t it?” commented Neale casually, leaning forward to change the carburetor adjustment.

* * * * *

Marise felt Paul lean over her shoulder from the back of the car.  “Say, Mother,” he said in her ear, “would you just as soon get in back with me for a while?”

Neale stopped the care.  Marise stepped out and in, and seated herself beside Paul.  He had apparently nothing to say, after all, looking fixedly down at his bare brown feet.

But presently he moved nearer to his mother and leaned his head against her breast.  This time she put her arm around him and held him close to her, the tears in her eyes.

CHAPTER XXIX

VIGNETTES FROM HOME LIFE

I

August 20.

Paul had been sent for blue-berries through the Eagle Rock woods to the high upland pasture where the Powers cows fed during the day.  On the upper edge of that, skirting a tract of slash left from an old cutting, was a berry-patch, familiar to all the children of Crittenden’s valley.

When at four o’clock there was no sign of him, and then at five still none, Marise began to feel uneasy, although she told herself that nothing in the world could happen to Paul on that well-known mountain-side.  He had taken Medor with him, who would certainly have come for help if Paul had fallen and hurt himself.  She excused herself to the tall, awkward lad from North Ashley come to try over his part in a quartet, asked Toucle to help Elly set the supper things on the table if she should be late, and set off at a rapid pace by the short-cut over the ledges.