She
naively placed the tip of it between her lips and looked at him,
standing there like a schoolgirl in her fresh gown, burnished hair
loosened and curling in riotous beauty across cheeks and ears.

He had seated himself on the wheelbarrow again; she stood looking down
at him, hands now bracketed on her narrow hips--so close that the fresh
fragrance of her grew faintly perceptible--a delicate atmosphere of
youth mingling with the perfume of the young garden.

Nina, basket on her arm, snipping away with her garden shears, glanced
over her shoulder--and went on, snipping. They did not notice how far
away her agricultural ardour led her--did not notice when she stood a
moment at the gate looking back at them, or when she passed out, pretty
head bent thoughtfully, the shears swinging loose at her girdle.

The prairie rosebuds in Eileen's basket exhaled their wild, sweet odour;
and Selwyn, breathing it, removed his hat like one who faces a cooling
breeze, and looked up at the young girl standing before him as though
she were the source of all things sweet and freshening in this opening
of the youngest year of his life.

She said, smiling absently at his question: "Certainly one can grow
younger; and you have done it in a day, here with me."

She looked down at his hair; it was bright and inclined to wave a
little, but whether the lighter colour at the temples was really
silvered or only a paler tint she was not sure.

"You are very like a boy, sometimes," she said--"as young as Gerald, I
often think--especially when your hat is off. You always look so
perfectly groomed: I wonder--I wonder what you would look like if your
hair were rumpled?"

"Try it," he suggested lazily.

"I? I don't think I dare--" She raised her hand, hesitated, the gay
daring in her eyes deepening to audacity. "Shall I?"

"Why not?"

"T-touch your hair?--rumple it?--as I would Gerald's! . . . I'm tempted
to--only--only--"

"What?"

"I don't know; I couldn't. I--it was only the temptation of a second--"
She laughed uncertainly. The suggestion of the intimacy tinted her
cheeks with its reaction; she took a short step backward; instinct,
blindly stirring, sobered her; and as the smile faded from eye and lip,
his face changed, too. And far, very far away in the silent cells of his
heart a distant pulse awoke.

She turned to her roses again, moving at random among the bushes,
disciplining with middle-finger and thumb a translucent, amber-ti