"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 s.p.a.ce.

"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 m.u.f.fins 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?"

"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?"

"My family and his family know," Martie said.

"Oh, but Martie--you can't mean that!" he burst out in agony. "What have I done! What have I done--to have you do this! You don't love him!"

"John," she said steadily, catching his hands, "even if I were free, you aren't, dear. We could never be married while Adele lives."

He turned his steady gaze upon her.

"Then last night--" he asked gravely.

"Last night I was a fool, John--I was all to blame! I'm so sorry--I'm so terribly sorry!"

"I thought last night--" He turned away under the willows, and she anxiously followed him. "You let me think you cared!"

"John, I do care!"

"You SAID you did!"

"I don't know what was the matter with me," Martie said wretchedly, "I was so carried away by seeing you so suddenly--and thinking of old times--and of all we had been through together--"

"But it wasn't of that we talked, Martie!"

"I know." Her head drooped. "I know!"

"I'm so sorry," he said, bewildered and hurt. "I don't understand you.

I can't believe that you are going to marry that man, whoever he is; you didn't say anything about him last night! Who is he--what right has he got to come into it?"

"He's a good and honourable man, John, and he asked me. And I said yes."

"You said yes--loving me?"

"Oh, John dear--you don't understand--"

"No," he said heavily, "I confess I don't."

The tone, curt and cold, brought tears to her eyes, and he saw them.

Instantly he was all penitence.

"Martie--ah, don't cry! Don't cry for me! Don't--I tell you, or I shall rush off somewhere--I can't see you cry! I'll try to understand. But you see last night--last night made me hope that you might care for me a little--I couldn't sleep, Martie, I was so happy! But I won't think of that. Now tell me, I'm quite quiet, you see. Tell me. You don't mean that you don't--feel anything about it?"

"John," she said simply, "I don't know whether I love you or not. I know that--that last night was one of the wonderful times of my life.

But it came on me like a thunderbolt--I never felt that way before--even when I was first engaged, even when I was married! But I don't know whether that's love, or whether it's just you--the extraordinary effect of you! You belong to one of the hardest parts of my life, and at first, last night, I thought it was just seeing you again--like any other old friend. Now--this morning--I don't know." She stopped, distressed. The man was silent. "If I've really made you unhappy, it will kill me, I think," Martie began, again, pleadingly.

"How can I go on into this marriage feeling that you are lonely and hurt about it?"

They had sat down on the old iron bench that had for fifty years stood rooted in the earth far down at the end of the garden, under pepper trees and gnarled evergreens and rusty pampas gra.s.s.