“I am,” Edith said, briefly.  She was in a great hurry!  She wanted to be alone, and argue to herself that she had been guilty of a dreadful disloyalty to him....  “Maurice?  Why!  He would be the last man in the world to—­to do that,—­darling old Maurice!  He has simply had a crush on somebody, and likes her better than he likes Eleanor—­or me; but that’s nothing.  Eleanor deserves it; and very likely I do, too!  But he’s so frightfully honorable about Eleanor—­he’s a perfect crank on honor!—­that he blames himself for even that.”  By this time the possibility that the unknown somebody was “horrid” had become unthinkable; she was probably terribly attractive, and Maurice had a crush on ... “though, of course, she can’t be really nice,” Edith thought; “Maurice simply doesn’t see through her.  Boys are so stupid!  They don’t know girls,” Again there was a Bingo moment of hot dislike for the “girl,” whoever she was!—­and she walked faster and faster.

Maurice, striding along beside her, was thinking of the irony of the “bouquet” she had thrown at him, and the innocence of that “Tell Eleanor”!  “What a child she is still!  And she’s not in love with Johnny—­” He didn’t understand his exhilaration when he said that, but, except when he reproached her for tearing ahead, it kept him silent...

Supper was ready when they got home, so Edith had no chance to be solitary, and after supper Johnny Bennett dropped in.  When he took his reluctant departure ("Confound him!” Maurice thought, impatiently, “he has on his sitting breeches to-night!”) Maurice told Edith to come into the garden with him, and listen to the evening primroses; “They ’blossom with a silken burst of sound’—­they do!” he insisted, for she jeered at the word “listen.”

“They don’t!” she said, and ran down the steps, flitting ahead of him in the dusk like a white moth.  In their preoccupation, they neither of them looked at Eleanor; sitting silently on the porch between Mr. and Mrs. Houghton.  They went, between the box hedges, to the primrose border, and Maurice quoted: 

“Silent they stood. 
Hand clasped in hand, in breathless hush around! 
And saw her shyly doff her soft green hood,
And blossom—­with a silken burst of sound!

“Let’s clasp hands,” Maurice suggested.

“No, thank you,” said Edith.  And so they watched and listened.  A tightly twisted bud loosened half a petal—­then another half—­and another—­until it was all a shimmering whorl of petals, each caught at one side to the honeyed crosspiece of the pistil; then:  “There!” said Maurice.  “Did you hear it?”—­all the silken disks were loose, and the flower cup, silver-gilt, spilled its fragrance into the stillness!

“It was the dream of a sound,” she admitted