Young Crossjay’s voice in the still morning air came to her cars.  The dear guileless chatter of the boy’s voice.  Why, assuredly it was young Crossjay who was the man she loved.  And he loved her.  And he was going to be an unselfish, sustaining, true, strong man, the man she longed for, for anchorage.  Oh, the dear voice! woodpecker and thrush in one.  He never ceased to chatter to Vernon Whitford walking beside him with a swinging stride off to the lake for their morning swim.  Happy couple!  The morning gave them both a freshness and innocence above human.  They seemed to Clara made of morning air and clear lake water.  Crossjay’s voice ran up and down a diatonic scale with here and there a query in semitone and a laugh on a ringing note.  She wondered what he could have to talk of so incessantly, and imagined all the dialogue.  He prattled of his yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, which did not imply past and future, but his vivid present.  She felt like one vainly trying to fly in hearing him; she felt old.  The consolation she arrived at was to feel maternal.  She wished to hug the boy.

Trot and stride, Crossjay and Vernon entered the park, careless about wet grass, not once looking at the house.  Crossjay ranged ahead and picked flowers, bounding back to show them.  Clara’s heart beat at a fancy that her name was mentioned.  If those flowers were for her she would prize them.

The two bathers dipped over an undulation.

Her loss of them rattled her chains.

Deeply dwelling on their troubles has the effect upon the young of helping to forgetfulness; for they cannot think without imagining, their imaginations are saturated with their Pleasures, and the collision, though they are unable to exchange sad for sweet, distills an opiate.

“Am I solemnly engaged?” she asked herself.  She seemed to be awakening.

She glanced at her bed, where she had passed the night of ineffectual moaning, and out on the high wave of grass, where Crossjay and his good friend had vanished.

Was the struggle all to be gone over again?

Little by little her intelligence of her actual position crept up to submerge her heart.

“I am in his house!” she said.  It resembled a discovery, so strangely had her opiate and power of dreaming wrought through her tortures.  She said it gasping.  She was in his house, his guest, his betrothed, sworn to him.  The fact stood out cut in steel on the pitiless daylight.

That consideration drove her to be an early wanderer in the wake of Crossjay.

Her station was among the beeches on the flank of the boy’s return; and while waiting there the novelty of her waiting to waylay anyone—­she who had played the contrary part!—­told her more than it pleased her to think.  Yet she could admit that she did desire to speak with Vernon, as with a counsellor, harsh and curt, but wholesome.

The bathers reappeared on the grass-ridge, racing and flapping wet towels.