heat. The gherkin a few inches above it defied the eye to
detect the swelling and lengthening that were taking place as a man
looked on. Tendrils crept and curled and twisted and interlocked from
vine to vine like queer, blind, living things feeling after one another.
Pale blossoms of the very color of the sunlight made the sunlight
sunnier, while bees boomed from flower to flower, bearing the pollen
from the males, shallow, cuplike, richly stamened, to the females
growing daintily from the end of the embryo cucumber as from a pinched,
wizened stem.

Advancing a few paces into this gigantic vinery, Claude found the one
main aisle intersected by numerous cross-aisles in any of which Rosie
might be working. He pushed his way slowly, partly because the warm air
heavy with pollen made him faint, and partly because this close pressure
of facile, triumphant nature had on his nerves a suggestion of the
menacing. On the pathway of soft, dark loam his steps fell noiselessly.

When he came upon Rosie she was buried in the depths of an almost
imperceptible cross-aisle and at the end remote from the center. As her
back was toward him and she had not heard his approach, he watched her
for a minute in silence. His quick eye noticed that she wore a
blue-green cotton stuff, with leaf-green belt and collar, that made her
the living element of her background, and that her movements and
attitudes were of the kind to display the exquisite lines of her body.
She was picking delicately the pale little blossoms and letting them
flutter to the ground. Her way was strewn with the frail yellow things
already beginning to wither and shrivel, adding their portion of earth
unto earth, to be transmuted to life unto life with the next rotation in
planting.

"Rosie, what are you doing?"

He expected her to be startled, but he was not prepared for the look of
terror with which she turned. He couldn't know the degree to which all
her thoughts were concentrated on him, nor the fears by which each of
her waking minutes was accompanied. She would have been startled if he
had come at one of his customary hours toward night; but it was as death
in her heart to see him like this in the middle of the forenoon. The
emotion was the greater on both sides because the long, narrow
perspective focused the eyes of each on the face of the other, with no
possibility of misreading. Claude remained where he was. Rosie clung for
support to the feeble aid of the neare