pped swimming; until the blindness
of that revelation should have passed.

She had been wrong about him again. He was not an Olympian. (But, of
course, Olympians themselves weren't, if it came to that; not always.)
He could never, she had been telling herself since that day when they
had had their one talk together, belong to any one. He did not--save
himself up for special people. He was just there, the same for
everybody, like, she had half humorously observed to her father, a
public drinking fountain.

If that was the rule, she, Mary Wollaston, was the exception to it. Not
Paula with her opulent armory, but she who had listened with him,
clinging to him, while Paula sang; she, who had talked to him while Paula
fought for her husband's life; she, whom he had come upon in the shade of
the oak tree at the edge of the hay field; she who sat near him, silent
now. This was the meager total that outweighed those uncounted hours of
Paula's. Somehow she had acquired a special significance for him.

Was she trying to evade saying that he had fallen in love with her. What
was the good--except that it sounded sweet--of using a phrase which could
be packed like a hand-bag with anything you chose to put into it? Graham
was in love with her. That boy in New York, whom she had found in a
panic of lonely terror lest he should prove a coward in the great ordeal
he was facing overseas had been for a few hours in love with her. What
would be the content of the phrase for a man like this?

Was she in love with him? Her thoughts up to now had been deep,
submerged, almost formless, but this question came to the surface and
touched her lips with a smile. Well, and what did the phrase mean to her?

All she could think of as she sat so still watching him, was those fine
hands of his, working as skillfully and swiftly as her father's ever
worked but at this humble task. She kept her eyes away for just a
little longer from his face. She wanted those hands. She wanted them
with an intensity that made it impossible at last to let the silence
endure any longer.

"Paula..." she said, and stopped in sheer surprise that her voice had
come at all; then began again, "Paula wanted you to tune her piano.
At Ravinia. I was angry, at that, until she reminded me that you
wouldn't be."

His hand laid down the small, odd shaped tool it held, but the next
moment picked it up again.

"I shouldn't have minded tuning her piano," he told her.

"I know,"