th
her fingers in her hair and elbows protruding, she saw a man come
swinging along the walk past the boundary fence, his eyes sweeping the
house from upstairs windows to side porch.

Mary Louise calmly proceeded with her toilette, making no sign. He
caught sight of her, paused a moment, and then vaulted stiffly over
the picket fence into the yard.

"'Lo," he said.

She had a hairpin in her mouth and returned the greeting with a slight
lifting of eyebrows. As her head was lowered and her chin tucked in,
this was a sufficiently effective reply.

"Musta rained pretty hard here," he ventured, as, noticing the damage
that the damp grass was doing to his trouser hems, he covered the
remaining distance between them in a series of violent haphazard
leaps.

The hairpin rendered her response unintelligible.

"How d'you find things?" gaining her side, and a bit more calmly.

Mary Louise deliberately tucked in one last recalcitrant wisp and
pinned it down, and then turned to him. "Pretty well." Her gaze was
level and critical.

"Aunt Sue better?"

She nodded. Then she turned and slowly walked within the inclosure of
the summerhouse and sat down. He followed her and stood framed in the
doorway.

"What's the gloom?" he asked directly, after a moment of silence.

"Nothing," she said, a little too brightly.

"Not interrupting anything, am I?"

Disregarding this: "What are you doing in Bloomfield?"

He laughed. "Aren't sorry I came, are you? This is Saturday. Times
have changed. Maybe you don't know. Proletariat's riding high."

"They're giving you the whole day now?" in a mildly dubious tone.

He turned away. "No. But Uncle Buzz was in a jam, and--well, I thought
I'd better come." He turned on her suddenly. "Keeping tab on me,
aren't you? How'd you know?"

"I reckon I'd better, Joe." And then more softly: "Think it's the best
way to do? Uncle Buzz's been in deep water before." She rose to her
feet and walked slowly to the opposite entrance. "How are things--at
the works?"

He was silent a moment. "Same old place. Take more'n a war to change
'em." He came and stood beside her in the doorway. The sun was making
a last desperate attempt to lighten the general gray of the sky with
broad shafts of orange, and as they watched, it settled slowly and
then dipped behind the dim blue of the distant hills. As at a signal,
a bird in a thicket somewhere over beyond them began a long throaty
warble. Another answered over to