ad him away with her. This moment was not
Paula's--whatever the other had been.

And the rest, standing there looking on, hadn't seen the bolt fall! They
were talking as idly and easily as if this were nothing but a hot summer
afternoon in the hay field.

"I told him," she heard Sylvia saying, "that there was another nice old
person he knew here with the lemonade, who thought I was only about
six.--Were you surprised when you saw who she was?--I'm going to take
him back to the apple house with us, now that Mary's come, so that he
can have the piano ready to dance by to-night." This last, apparently,
to Graham.

She even heard herself join in,--the voice was hers anyhow--when Graham,
commenting upon the view across the field, remarked that it was so
intensely farm-like that it had almost the look of a stage setting.

"It is like something," she said then. "It's like the first act of _Le
Chemineau_. We ought to have a keg of cider instead of two jugs of
lemonade and we should have brought it in a wheelbarrow instead of in
the Ford."

"Well, we couldn't take Mr. March back in a wheelbarrow," Sylvia said,
"so I'm glad it isn't the first act of whatever-you-call-it. Because he's
simply got to fix the piano well enough for jazz."

Mary couldn't remember that he spoke a word, but he got into the back
seat of the Ford with her when Sylvia slid under the wheel.

"If you'll promise," Sylvia said to March at the end of the breathless
mile back to the apple house, "if you'll promise to go straight to work
at it and never stop until it'll play the _Livery Stable Blues_, then
I'll go back to the hay field and see that Rush gets some of the lemonade
before those laborers drink it all up. You'll see to him, won't you,
Mary? Stand right over him and be severe, so that we can dance to-night.
You aren't as excited about it as you ought to be. I think I'll come in
and start him."

And this she did while the Ford executed a little jazz rhythm of its own
outside. She didn't stay more than a minute or two though. When she saw
him fairly occupied, tools in hand, over his task, she darted away again
with a last injunction to severity upon Mary.

She had seen nothing. The two were left alone.

Mary sat where she could watch his fine skilled hands at work. The
negligent precision with which they accomplished their varied tasks
occupied her, made it possible to continue for a while the silence she
needed until her world should have sto