As she hurried over the rough trail, frankly hastening, now frankly alarmed, she thought that probably for all the life-time of the people in the valley the death of Frank Warner would set a sinister element of lurking danger in those familiar wooded slopes.  Nothing could have happened to Paul, but still she hurried faster and faster, and as she came near the upper edge of the pasture she began to shout loudly, “Paul!  Paul!” and to send out the high yodel-cry that was the family assembly call.  That act of shouting brought her a step nearer to panic.

But almost at once she heard the little boy’s answer, not far from her saw his dog bounding through the bushes, and as she emerged from the woods into the open pasture she saw Paul running towards her, pail in hand, evidently astonished to know her there.  But there was about him something more than astonishment, something which Marise’s mother-eye catalogued as furtitve, that consciousness of something to hide which always looks to grown-ups like guilt.  She gave no sign of seeing this, however, stopping short to catch her breath, smiling at him, and wondering with great intensity what in the world it could be.  He looked a little frightened.

He came up to her, answering her smile uneasily, and she saw that he had only a few berries in his pail.  At this she was relieved, thinking that possibly all that had happened was that he had lingered to play.  But when she glanced back at his face, she had the impression that there was something more, very much more.  He had received some indelible impression and it was his instinct to hide it from his mother.  Her heart sank forebodingly.

“What is the best thing to do?” she asked herself.  “To speak about it first, or to wait till he does?”

She sat down on a stone, fanning herself with her hat, watching him, trying to make out the meaning of every shift of expression, turn of eye, position of his hands, carriage of his head, bringing to this all her accumulated knowledge of Paul, afire with the sudden passion to protect him which had flamed up with her intuition that something had happened to him.

(Come and gone with the dry rapidity of fingers snapped, she had thought, “The point is, that other people may be more clever than mothers, but nobody else cares enough, always, always to try to understand!”)

“I thought I’d come up and walk back with you,” she offered.

“I haven’t got very many,” said Paul, abashed, looking down at the few, blue, bloom-covered balls in the bottom of his shining tin pail.  “I was trying to hurry up and get enough for supper, anyhow.”

Marise in spite of herself, moved by pity for his confusion, offered him a way out.  It always seemed to her too dreadful for anyone not to have a way out, even if it implied a fib.  “Weren’t there very many on the bushes?” she asked.

But he refused it with a characteristic integrity.  “Oh yes, there were lots there,” he said.