did his
allotted task with a generosity difficult to praise too highly. And
Death paid visits here and there but passed the cottage by. At the
beginning of the second week, Nature, who has no patience with any
attempt to refute her laws, especially on the part of those who are
young and vigorous, took Joan in hand. "What is all this, my girl?" she
said, "sitting here with your hands in your lap while everybody and
everything is working and making and preparing. Stir yourself, bustle
up, get busy, there's lots to be done in the springtime if the autumn
is to bear fruit. You're sound and whole for all that you've been hurt.
If you were not, Death would be here without your calling him. Up you
get, now." And, with good-natured roughness, she laid her hand under
Joan's elbow, gave a hoist and put her on her feet.

Whereupon, in the natural order of things, Joan turned from self-blame
to find a victim who should be held responsible for the pain that she
had suffered, and found the girl with the red lips and the white face
and the hair that came out of a bottle. Ah, yes! It was she who had
caught Marty when he was hurt and disappointed. It was she who had
taken advantage of his loneliness and dragged him clown to her own
level, this girl whom she had called Fairy and who had had the
effrontery to go up to the place on the edge of the woods that was the
special property of Marty and herself. And for the rest of the week,
with the sap running eagerly in her veins once more, she moved
restlessly about the orchard and the garden, heaping coals of fire on
to the all too golden head of Tootles.

Then came the feeling of wounded pride, the last step towards
convalescence. Marty had chosen between herself and this girl. Without
giving her a real chance to put things right he had slipped away
silently and taken Tootles with him. Not she, but the girl with the red
lips and the pale face and the hair that came out of a bottle had
stripped Marty of his armor, and the truth of it was that Marty, yes,
even Marty, was not really a knight but a very ordinary man.

Out of the orchard and the garden she went, once she had arrived at
this stage, and tramped the countryside with her ears tuned to catch
the alluring strains of the mechanical music of the Round-about. She
had not only been making a fool of herself but had been made to look a
fool, she thought. Her pain and suffering and disillusion had been
wasted. All these dull and lonely da