Was it not inevitable that poor, lonely Nicholas Moor should have sought out my New Lady? A night or two after her arrival he saw her again, at a supper in the church "lecture-room." He was bringing in a great freezer of ice-cream and when she greeted him he had all but dropped the freezer. Then a certain, big obvious deacon whose garden adjoined my own had come importantly and snatched the burden away, and the boy had stood, shamefast, trying to say something; but his face was lighted as at a summons. So the New Lady had divined his tragedy, the loneliness which his shyness masked as some constant plight of confusion.

"Come and see me sometime," she had impulsively bidden him. "Do you know where I am staying?"

Did he know that! Since he had seen her in the meadow had he known anything else? And after some days of hard trying he came one night, arriving within the dusk as behind a wall. Even in the twilight, when he was once under the poplars, he did[Pg 192] not know what way to look. To seem to look straight along the road was unnatural. To seem to look out across the opposite fields was hypocrisy. To look at the house which held the New Lady was unthinkable. So, as he went in at the gate and up the fern-bordered walk, he examined the back of his hand—near, and then a little farther away. As he reached the steps he was absorbedly studying his thumb.

From a place of soft light, shed through a pink box shade on the table, and of scattered willow chairs and the big leaves of plants, the New Lady came toward him.

"You did come!" she said. "I thought you wouldn't, really."

With the utmost effort Nicholas detached one hand from his hat brim and gave it her. From head to foot he was conscious, not of the touch of her hand, little and soft, but of the bigness and coarseness of his own hand.

"I hated to come like everything," he said.

At this of course she laughed, and she went back to her willow chair and motioned him to his. He got upon it, crimson and wretched.

"As much as that!" she observed.

"You know I wanted to come awfully, too," he modified it, "but I dreaded it—like sixty. I—I can't explain...." he stumbled.

[Pg 193]

"Don't," said the New Lady, lightly, and took pity on him and rang a little bell.

She thought again how fine and distinguished he was, as he had seemed to her on the day when she had first spoken to him. He sat staring at her, trying to realize that he was on the veranda with her, hearing the sound of the little bell she had rung. He had wanted something like this, wistfully, passionately. Miserable as he was, he rested in the moment as within arms. And the time seemed distilled in that little silver bell-sound and the intimacy of waiting with her for some one to come.

He knew that some one with a light footfall did come to the veranda. He heard the New Lady call her Elfa. But he saw only her hands, plump and capable and shaped like his own, moving among the glasses. After which his whole being became absorbed in creditably receiving the tall, cool tumbler on the tray which the capable hands held out to him. A period of suspended intelligence ensued, until he set the empty glass on the table. Then the little maid had gone, and the New Lady, sipping her own glass, was talking to him.

"You were lying on the grass that day," she said, "as if you understood grass. Not many do understand about grass, and almost nobody understands the country. People say, 'Come, let us go into the country,' and when they get there is it the country[Pg 194] they want at all? No, it is the country sports, the country home,—everything but the real country. They play match games. They make expeditions, climb things in a stated time, put in a day at a stated place. I often think that they must go home leaving the country aghast that they could have come and gone and paid so little heed to it. Presently we are going to have some charming people out here who will do the same thing."

So she talked, asking him nothing, even her eyes leaving him free. It seemed to him, tense and alert and ill at ease as he listened, that he, too, was talking to her. From the pressing practicalities, the self-important deacon, the people who did not trouble to talk to him, his world abruptly escaped, and in that world he walked, an escaped thing too, forgetful even of the little roll of verses which he had dared to bring.

Yet when she paused, he looked out at her shrinkingly from under his need to reply. He did not look at her face, but he looked at her hands, so little that each time he saw them they were a new surprise and alien to him. He looked away from them to the friendliness of her smile. And when he heard himself saying detached, irrelevant things, he again fell to studying one of his own hands, big and coarse and brown. Oh, he thought, the difference between her and him was so hopelessly the difference in their hands.

[Pg 195]

In an absurdly short time the need to be gone was upon him; but of this he could not speak, and he sat half unconscious of what she was saying, because of his groping for the means to get away. Clearly, he must not interrupt her to say that he must go. Neither could he reply to what she said by announcing his intention. And yet when he answered what she said, straightway her exquisite voice went on with its speech to him. How, he wondered, does anybody ever get away from anywhere? If only something would happen, so that he could slip within it as within doors, and take his leave.

Something did happen. By way of the garden, and so to a side door, there arrived those whose garden adjoined,—the big, obvious, self-important deacon, and behind him Three Light Gowns. The little maid Elfa came showing them through the house, in the pleasant custom of the village. And when the New Lady, with pretty, expected murmurings, rose to meet them, Nicholas got to his feet confronting the crisis of saying good-by, and the moment closed upon him like a vise. He heard his voice falter among the other voices, he saw himself under the necessity to take her hand and the deacon's hand, and the hands, so to speak, of the Three Light Gowns; and this he did as in a kind of unpractised bewildering minuet.

[Pg 196]

And then he found his eyes on a level with eyes that he had not seen before—blue eyes, gentle, watching, wide—and a fresh, friendly little face under soft hair. It was Elfa, taking away the empty glasses. And the boy, in his dire need to ease the instant, abruptly and inexplicably held out his hand to her too. She blushed, sent a frightened look to the New Lady, and took the hand in hers that was plump and capable, with its strong, round wrist. And the little maid, being now in an embarrassment like his own, the two hands clung for a moment, as if they had each the need.

"Good night," she said, trembling.

"Good night," said the New Lady, very gently.

"Oh, good night!" burst from the boy as he fled away.

It was Elfa who admitted him at his next coming. The screened porch was once more in soft light from the square rose shade, and the place had the usual pleasant, haunted air of the settings of potentialities. As if potentiality were a gift of enchantment to human folk.

The New Lady was not at home, Elfa told him, in her motherly little heart pitying him. And at the news he sat down, quite simply, in the chair in which he had sat before. He must see her. It was unthinkable that she should be away. [Pg 197]To-night he had meant to have the courage to leave with her his verses.

On the willow table lay her needlework. It was soft and white beyond the texture of most clouds, and she had wrought on it a pattern like the lines on a river. As his eyes rested on it, Nicholas could fancy it lying against her white gown and upon it her incomparable hands. Some way, she seemed nearer to him when he was not with her than when, with her incomparable hands and her fluent speech, she was in his presence. When she was not with him, he could think what to say to her. When he stood before her—the thought of his leave-taking on that veranda seized upon him, so that he caught his breath in the sharp thrust of mortified recollection, and looked away and up.

His eyes met those of Elfa, who was quietly sitting opposite.

"How they must all have laughed at me. You too!" he said.

"Why?" she asked.

"That last time I was here. Shaking hands that way," he explained.

"I didn't laugh," she unexpectedly protested; "I cried."

He looked at her. And this was as if he were seeing her for the first time.

"Cried?" he repeated.

[Pg 198]

"Nobody ever shakes hands with me," Elfa told him.

He stared at her as she sat on the edge of her chair, her plump hands idle on her apron.

"No," he admitted, "no, I don't suppose they do. I didn't think—"

But he had not thought of her at all.

"By the door all day I let in hand-shakes," she said, "an' then I let 'em out again. But I don't get any of 'em for me."

That, Nicholas saw, was true enough. Even he had been mortified because he had taken her hand.

"Once," Elfa said, "I fed a woman at the back door. An' when she went she took hold o' my hand, thankful. An' then you done it too—like it was a mistake. That's all, since I worked out. I don't know folks outside much, only some that don't shake ha............