The winds grew even higher, shriller; the falls of snow vanished before drenching, brown rains, and the afternoons perceptibly lengthened.  There was arbutus on the slopes, robins, before he recognized that April was accomplished.  A farmer ploughed the vegetable garden behind the house; and Honduras dragged the cedar bean poles from their resting place.  Mariana soon appeared.

“I wouldn’t miss the spring at Shadrach for a hundred years of hibiscus,” she told him.  He gathered that she had been south.  She brought him great pleasure, beat him with annoying frequency at sniff, and was more companionable than ever before.  She had, he thought, forgot James Polder; and he was careful to avoid the least reference to the latter.  Mariana was a sensible girl; birth once more had told.

She was better looking than he had remembered her, more tranquil; a distinguished woman.  It was incredible that a man approximately her equal had not appeared.  Then, without warning—­they were seated on the porch gazing through the tender green foliage of the willow at the vivid young wheat beyond—­she said: 

“Howat, I am certain that things are going badly with Jimmy.  He wrote to me willingly in the winter, but twice since then he hasn’t answered a letter.”

He suppressed a sharp, recurrent concern.  “It’s that Harriet,” he told her, capitally diffident.  “You are stupid to keep it up.  What chance would he have had answering her letters married to you?”

“This is different,” she replied confidently.  He saw that he had been wrong—­nothing had changed, lessened.  Howat swore silently.  That damnable episode might well spoil her entire existence.  But he wisely avoided argument, comment.  A warm current of air, fragrant with apple blossoms, caught the ribbon-like smoke of his cigarette and dissipated it.  She smiled with half-closed eyes at the new flowering of earth.  Her expression grew serious, firm.  “I think we’d better go out to Harrisburg,” she remarked, elaborately casual, “and see Jimmy for ourselves.”

He protested vehemently, but—­from experience in that quarter—­with a conviction of futility.  “She’ll laugh at you,” he told Mariana.  “Haven’t you any proper pride?” She shook her head.

“Not a scrap.  It’s just that quality in Jim that annoyed me, and spoiled everything.  I’d cook for them if it would do any good.”  Irritation mastered him.  “This is shameful, Mariana,” he declared.  “Don’t your position, your antecedents, stand for anything?  If I had Jasper Penny here I would tell him what I thought of his confounded behaviour!” He rose, and walked the length of the porch and back.

“The first part of next week?” she queried.  “I won’t go a mile,” he stated, in sheer bravado.  “Then,” said Mariana, “I must do it alone.”  He muttered a period in which the term hussy was solely audible.  “Which of us?” she asked, calmly.  “Actually,” he exploded, “I feel sorry for that Harriet.  I sympathize with her.  She got the precious James fair enough, and the decent thing for you is to keep away.”