She was looking straight at him; one hand was hanging at her side, the other laid over her heart, as if she had involuntarily put it there when she saw him.  Her corn-coloured hair was a little loosened; she was not smiling.  She wore something limp and transparent, of white, he thought, or pale, pale blue, like the sky, with faint stripes making her figure look more slender even than it was.

They looked at each other in a silence that grew more and more awkward by great plunges.  Peter had time to wish that he had kept his eyes shut, to wish that he had smiled when he first saw her—­ he could not have forced himself to smile now—­to wonder how they were ever to speak—­where they were rushing—­rushing—­rushing—­ before she turned noiselessly and vanished into the dim room.

Peter lay there, and his heart pounded.  For a few minutes his senses whirled so madly that he felt suffocated.  He dared not sit up, he dared not stir; from head to foot thrilling waves of surprise, and even a little of terror, went over him.

Never in his life had he experienced this sort of feeling before.  He knew that he hated it, even while his whole spirit sang and soared in the new ecstasy.  A moment ago he had been a tired man, fretted because his wife forgot to meet him; now there was something new in the world.  And rapidly all the world became only a background, only a setting, for this extraordinary sensation.  He sat up, after awhile, looked at the familiar porch, with the potted flowers, and Alix’s boxes, where bachelor’s-buttons, marguerites, and geraniums had been alternated to make a touch of patriotic colour on July Fourth.  The hills beyond still swam in the hot sunlight, the mountain rose into the blue, but the light that changes all life lay over them for Peter.

He said to himself that it was awkward—­he did not know how he could enter that door and talk to Cherry.  And yet he knew that that meeting of Cherry, that the common exchange of words and glances, that the daily trifling encounters with Cherry were all poignantly significant now.  Or if he did not fully sense all this yet he felt thrilled to the soul with the knowledge that she was there, back in the shadowy house somewhere, with the pale striped gown and the disordered corn-coloured hair, and that somehow they must meet, somehow they must talk together.

He felt no impulse toward hurry.  He might sit on this porch another hour, might saunter off toward the creek.  It mattered nothing; the hour was steadily approaching when she must reappear.

Alix drove in, full of animated apologies.  She managed the car far better than he, and no thought of an accident had troubled him.  But she explained that she had been to get eggs for a setting hen, and Antone had stopped her and told her that the new calf had been prematurely born, out on the hills, and had “been gone for die,” and so she had driven over to Juanita, and gotten the calf.