d his exhilaration when he said that, but,
except when he reproached her for tearing ahead, it kept him silent...

Supper was ready when they got home, so Edith had no chance to be
solitary, and after supper Johnny Bennett dropped in. When he took his
reluctant departure ("Confound him!" Maurice thought, impatiently, "he
has on his sitting breeches to-night!") Maurice told Edith to come into
the garden with him, and listen to the evening primroses; "They 'blossom
with a silken burst of sound'--they _do_!" he insisted, for she jeered
at the word "listen."

"They don't!" she said, and ran down the steps, flitting ahead of him in
the dusk like a white moth. In their preoccupation, they neither of them
looked at Eleanor; sitting silently on the porch between Mr. and Mrs.
Houghton. They went, between the box hedges, to the primrose border, and
Maurice quoted:

"Silent they stood.
Hand clasped in hand, in breathless hush around!
And saw her shyly doff her soft green hood,
And blossom--with a silken burst of sound!

"Let's clasp hands," Maurice suggested.

"No, thank you," said Edith. And so they watched and listened. A tightly
twisted bud loosened half a petal--then another half--and another--until
it was all a shimmering whorl of petals, each caught at one side to the
honeyed crosspiece of the pistil; then: "_There!_" said Maurice. "Did
you hear it?"--all the silken disks were loose, and the flower cup,
silver-gilt, spilled its fragrance into the stillness!

"It was the dream of a sound," she admitted

Her voice was a dream sound, too, he thought; a wordless tenderness for
her flooded his mind, as the perfume of the primroses flooded the night.
It seemed as if the lovely ignorance of her was itself a perfume! "'Tell
Eleanor'! She doesn't know the wickedness of the world, and I don't want
her to." He put his hand on her shoulder in the old, brotherly way--but
drew it back as if something had burned him! That recoil should have
revealed things to him, but it didn't. So far as his own consciousness
went, he was too intent on what he called "the square deal" for Eleanor,
to know what had happened to him; all he knew was that Edith, all of a
sudden, was grown up! Her childishness was gone. He mustn't even put his
hand on her shoulder! He had an uneasy moment of wondering--"Girls are
so darned knowing, nowadays!"--whether she might be suspicious as to
what that secret was, which she had advised him to "tell Eleanor"? But