“Don’t say ‘not really!’” Lydia, who happened to hate this expression, which as a matter of fact Martie only used in moments of airy rebellion, said sharply:  “If that man hasn’t any sense, you ought to have!”

“We used to be intimate friends a few years ago,” Martie offered mildly.  “We had a lot to say.”

“A lot that couldn’t be said before Pa and me, I suppose?” Lydia asked bitingly.  Martie was silent.  “What do you propose to tell Cliff of this delightful friendship?” Lydia pursued.  “And how long a visit do your friends propose to make?”

“Only until to-morrow.  Mrs. Silver wants me to visit them, you know, at Glen Mary.”

“Do you intend to go?” Lydia asked stonily.

“Well, I suppose not.  But it would be a wonderful experience, of course.  But I suppose not.”  Martie sighed heavily.  “I really hadn’t thought it out,” she pleaded.

“I should think you hadn’t!  I never heard anything like it,” Lydia said.  “I should think the time had come when you really might think it out—­I don’t know what things are coming to—­”

“Oh, Lyddy dear, don’t be so tiresome!” Martie said rudely.  Lydia at once left the room, with a short goodnight, but the interrupted mood of memories and dreams did not return.  Martie sat still a long time, wrapped in the blanket she caught from the bed, staring vaguely into space.

“I’ve got to think it all out,” she told herself, “I mustn’t make—­ another mistake.”

And yet when she crept in beside Teddy, and flung her arm about him, she would not let the half-formed phrase stand.  The step that had brought her splendid boy to her arms was not a mistake.

She slept lightly, and was up at five o’clock.  Teddy, just shifting from the stage when nothing could persuade him to sleep in the morning to the stage when nothing could persuade him to wake, merely rolled over when she left him.  Martie, bathed, brushed, dressed in white, went into the garden.  They had arranged no meeting, but John came toward her under the pepper trees as she closed the door.

Again they walked, this time in morning freshness.  Martie showed him the school gate, with “Girls” lettered over it, where she had entered for so many years.  They walked past the church, and up toward the hills.  She said she must get home in time to help Pauline with breakfast for the augmented family, and John went with her into the old kitchen, and cut peaches and mixed muffins with the enthusiasm of an expert, talking all the time.

“But tell me about Adele, John!” she said suddenly, when Lydia and her father had left the breakfast table, and they two were alone again.  “How do you explain it?”