e. How old are you, you nice young thing?
Going on six? Lookout! You'll smash the lemonade!"

"We're going to surprise them," Sylvia announced when they had arrived,
miraculously without disaster, at the northeast eighty. They had careened
through the wagon gate and halted under an oak tree at the edge of the
field. "I'll go and tell them I've brought the lemonade, but I won't say
anything about you. You keep out of sight behind the tree. Then Graham
won't want to go and brush his hair."

It startled Mary to realize that she had forgotten all about Graham. Not
even the sight of his sister had recalled the--highly special nature of
the state of things between them nor suggested the need for preparing an
attitude to greet him with. At all events she wouldn't follow Sylvia's
suggestion and pop out at him from behind a tree.

He was, it happened, the first person the child encountered in her flight
across the field; the others, indistinguishable at that distance, were in
a group a little farther away. Mary walked out to meet him when she saw
him coming toward her and competently gave the encounter its tone by
beginning to talk to him--about how hot it was and how nice the hay
smelled and how good it seemed to be back here at Hickory Hill--while
they were still a good twenty paces apart. You couldn't strike any sort
of sentimental note very well when you had to begin at a shout. Then she
led him back to the lemonade, gave him a cigarette and answered at length
and with a good deal of spontaneous vivacity his obligatory questions
about Paula and the opening of the Ravinia season.

She was in the full tide of this--and was, since she had sat down upon a
small boulder Graham had insisted she take possession of, screened by the
trunk of the tree--when Sylvia hailed her brother from, not very far away
with the statement that Rush wouldn't stop for anything or anybody until
once more around the field. It was March, then, who was audibly coming
along with her. Mary rose, broke off about Paula, and moved the single
step it needed to give her sight of him.

She saw nothing else but him. She saw his head go back as from the actual
impact of the sight of her. She saw the look, unmistakable as a blast
from a trumpet, that flamed into his face. And then her world swam. Paula
wasn't singing now, "Hither, my love! Here I am! Here!" Nor could Paula
come upon him now, from anywhere, and take him by the shoulders and kiss
his cheek and le