“Oh, well!” He brought his mind with an obvious effort to Adele.  “We had sort of a hard time of it—­she wasn’t well, and I wasn’t.  Her sister came on—­she’s—­she’s quite a woman!” Evidently still a little impressed by some memory, he made a wild gesture with his hands.  “She thought I didn’t understand Adele?” he went on questioningly.  “After she left, Adele simply went away.  She went to a boarding-house where she knew the woman, and when I went there to see her she told me that it was all over.  That’s what she said:  it was all over.  I went to see the doctor, and he didn’t deny that they had gone somewhere—­Atlantic City, I think it was, together!  She asked for a divorce, and I gave it to her, and her sister came on to stay with her for the time she got it.  She seemed awfully unhappy.  It was just before my book was taken.  Her sister said she was unlucky, and I guess she was—­poor Adele!”

“And there was never any fight, or any special cause?”

“Oh, no!” He smiled his odd and charming smile.  “But I think I bored her!” he said.  “I do bore most people!  But most people don’t—­don’t understand me, Martie,” he went on, with a quality almost like hunger in his eyes and voice.  “And that’s why I have been longing and longing to see you again.  You understand!  And with you I always feel as if I could talk, as if what I said mattered, as if—­well, as if I had been on a hot desert walk, and came suddenly to trees, and shade, and a bubbling spring!”

“You poet!” she smiled.  But a pang shook her heart.  It was sweet, it was perilously sweet, but it could not be for long now.

“John,” she began, when like a happy child he had loitered out with her to feed the chickens, “I’ve got something to tell you.  I’m sorry.”

Scattering crumbled cornbread on the pecked, bare ground under the willows, he gave her a confiding look.  Her heart stopped.

“It’s about Mr. Frost,” Martie went on, “I’ve known him all my life; he’s one of the nicest men here.  I’m—­I’m engaged to him, John!”

His hand arrested, John looked at her steadily.  There was a silence.

“How do you mean—­to be married?” he asked tonelessly, without stirring.

Martie nodded.  Under the willows, and in the soft fog of the morning, the thing suddenly seemed a tragedy.

“Aren’t you,” he said simply, “aren’t you going to marry me?”

His tone brought the tears to her eyes.

“I can’t!” she whispered.  “John, I’m sorry!”

“Sorry,” he echoed dully.  “But—­but I don’t understand.  You can’t mean that you have promised—­that you expect—­to marry any one else but me?” And as Martie again allowed a silence to fall, he took a few steps away from her, walking like a person blinded by sudden pain.  “I don’t understand,” he said again.  “I never thought of anything but that we belonged to each other—­I’ve thought of it all the time!  And now you tell me—­I can’t believe it!  Is it settled?  Is it all decided?”