ards, his hands hanging loose over his knees.
She stood and looked down at him, at the arch of his long, slender
back dropping to the narrow hips. She could feel the sudden crush of
her breath in her chest and the sighing throb in her throat and her
lips parting.

He grasped the hands she stretched out to him at arms' length. She set
her teeth and pressed her feet to the ground, and leaned back, her weight
against his weight, tugging.

He came up to his feet, alert, laughing at the heavy strength of her
pull. As they ran down the field he still held, loosely, like a thing
forgotten, her right hand.

* * * * *

Through the long June night on her bed in the room under the gable--the
hot room that smelt of plaster and of the apples stored in the loft
behind it--she lay thinking.

Gwinnie had turned her back, burrowing into her pillow with a final shrug
of her hips. She was asleep now in her corner.

"If I were you I wouldn't think about him, Sharlie"--She knew what
Gwinnie meant. But thinking was one thing and caring was another.
Thinking was the antidote to caring. If she had let her mind play freely
over Gibson Herbert in the beginning--But Gibson stopped her thinking,
and John Conway made her think. That was the difference.

There was nothing about John that was like Gibson. Not a look, not a
gesture, not the least thought in his mind. His mind was like his
body, clean and cold and beautiful. Set on fire only by dreams; loving
you in a dream, a dream that burned him up and left him cold to you.
Cold and clean.

There were things she laid up against him, the poor dear; a secret hoard
of grievances now clear to her in the darkness; she found herself turning
them over and over, as if positively her mind owed his romantic apathy a
grudge. Little things she remembered. Three things.

Yesterday in the hayfield, John pitching hay on to the cart, and she
standing on the top of the load, flattening down the piles as he swung
them up. Gwinnie came with a big fork, swanking, for fun, trying to pitch
a whole haycock. In the dark of the room she could see Gwinnie's little
body straining back from the waist, her legs stiffening, her face pink
and swollen; and John's face looking at Gwinnie.

She shouted down at him, "Why can't you _take_ the damned thing? She'll
break her back with it." And he shouted up, "That's her look-out." (But
he took it.) He didn't like Gwinnie.

That time. And the