One day, with Teddy and Clifford, she went up to the old house.  Ruth, clean and mannerly, raised her innocent girl’s face for her new mother’s kiss, for Ruth was in the secret.  Martie liked Ruth, a simple, normal little person who played “jacks” and “houses” with her friends under the lilac trees, and had a “best dress” and loved “Little Women” with a shy passion.  Martie foresaw only a pleasant relationship with the child.  What she lacked in imagination was more than made up in sense.  Ruth would graduate, marry, have children, as placidly as a stout and sturdy little cow.  But Martie and Ruth would always love, even if they did not understand, each other.

The house was old-fashioned:  big double parlours, big folding doors, and one enormous square bathroom on the second floor, for the needs of all the house.  The cheerful, orderly pantries smelt of painted wood; the kitchen had cost old Polly two or three unnecessary miles of walking every month of her twenty-six years’ tenancy.  Martie liked the garden best, and the old stables painted white.  She loved the rich mingled scents of wallflower and alyssum and lemon verbena; and, as they walked about, she tucked a velvet plume of dark heliotrope into the belt of her thin white gown.  “My first colour!” she said to Clifford.

Ruth assumed charming, older-sister airs with Teddy.  She laughed at his comments, and quoted him to Martie:  “He says he’s going to learn to ride Whitey!” “He says he doesn’t like such big houses!”

Clifford opened doors and smiled at Martie’s interest.  She could see that he loved every inch of the old place.  She saw herself everywhere, writing checks at the old walnut desk, talking with Polly in the pantry.  She could sow Shirley poppies in the bed beneath the side windows; she could have Mrs. Hunter, the village sewing woman, comfortably established here in the sewing-room for weeks, if she liked, making ginghams for Ruth and Ruth’s new mother.

When those days came Clifford would gradually abandon this unwelcome role of lover, and be her kindly, middle-aged old friend again.  Sometimes, in the new shrinking reluctance she felt when they were alone, she wondered what had become of the old Clifford.  There was something vaguely offending, something a little undignified, about this fatuous, eager, elderly man who could so poorly simulate patience.  He was not passionate—­she might have forgiven him that.  But he was assuming passion, assuming youth, happily egotistical.

He was fifty-one:  he had won a beautiful woman hardly more than half his age.  He wanted to talk about it, to have the conversation always congratulatory and flattering.  He had the attitude of a young husband, without his youth, to which everything is forgiven.

Altogether, Martie found her engagement strangely trying.  Rose, instantly suspicious, was presently told of it, and Martie’s sisters and Rose planned an announcement luncheon for early July.  Martie thought she would really be glad when the fuss and flurry was over.