“Too hot for your grandmother!” Edith said—­bare-armed, open-throated, her creamy neck reddening with sunburn.

Toward noon, Maurice’s chaperon, toiling out across the hot stubble to watch him, called from under an umbrella, “Edith!  You’ll get freckled.”

“When I begin to worry about my complexion, I’ll let you know,” Edith retorted; “Maurice, your biceps are simply great!”

“How she flatters him!” Eleanor thought; “And she knows he is looking at her.”  He was!  Edith, lifting a forkful of hay, throwing the weight on her right thigh and straining backward with upraised arms, her big hat tumbling over one ear, and the sweat making her hair curl all around her forehead, was something any man would like to look at!  No man would want to look at Eleanor—­a tired, dull, jealous woman, whose eyes were blinking from the glare and whose face sagged with elderly fatigue.  She turned silently and went away.  “He likes to be with her—­but he doesn’t say so.  Oh, if he would only be frank!” Her eyes blurred, but she would not let the tears come, so they fell backward into her heart—­which brimmed with them, to overflow, after a while, in bitter words.

Edith, watching the retreating figure, never guessing those unshed tears, said, despairingly, to herself, “I suppose I ought to go home with her?” She dropped her pitchfork; “I’ll come back after dinner, boys,” she said; “I must look after Eleanor now.”

“Quitter!” Maurice jeered; but Johnny said, “I’m glad she’s gone; it’s too much for a girl.”  His eyes followed her as she went running over the field to catch up with Eleanor, who, on the way back to the house, only poke once; she told Edith that flattery was bad taste the cup overflowed!  “Men hate flattery,” she said.

“Hate it?” said Edith, “they lap it up!”

When the two young men sat down under an oak for their noon hour, with a bucket of buttermilk standing precariously in the grass beside them, John said again, anxiously, “It was too hot for her; I hope she won’t have a headache.”

“She always has headaches,” Maurice said, carelessly.

“What!” said Bennett, alarmed; “she’s never said a word to me about headaches.”

“Oh, you mean Edith?  I thought you meant Eleanor.  Edith never had a headache in her life!  Some girl, Johnny?”

“Has that just struck you?” said John.

Maurice fished some grass seeds out of the buttermilk, took a deep draught of it, and looked at his companion, lying full length on the stubble in the shadow of the oak.  It came to him with a curious shock that Bennett was in love.  No “calf love” this time!  Just a young man’s love for a young woman—­sound and natural, and beautiful, and right....  “I wonder,” Maurice thought, “does she know it?”

It seemed as if Johnny, puffing at his pipe, and slapping a mosquito on his lean brown hand, answered his thought: 

“Edith’s astonishingly young.  She doesn’t realize that she’s grown up.”  There was a pause; “Or that I have.”