A sound from beyond the thin partition struck him to silence. It was a high, querulous voice calling, "B—a—b."
Anne started. In another moment Aunt Harriet would come trailing in, her frail hands moving gracefully to insure safety, her sightless blue eyes staring before her. It was years since Harriet Saunders had talked to a city man, a professional man, a man worthy of her own Harrington culture, a culture guarded through long years with Hilda Mitchell's brother, kept undimmed to hand down to "the girls." In another moment she would be there, winding about him the snake-like coils of her selfish monopolization.
"Would you mind if we went outside?" Anne whispered, partly because she could so convey the need for instant action, partly to bear out the quickly invented reason. "Aunt Het is rather an invalid and she has been asleep. If no one answers she'll drop off again, but if she hears us——"
"Certainly," Roger whispered back, and they tiptoed from the room together, out through the nearer kitchen to the yard. And there Anne paused. Where could she take him? There was no spot on that windblown dryness, no garden nook. For a moment she thought of the barn, a favorite place of her own. But it was so overtoned; herself and Roger Barton, who had come to tell her of a position, sitting in the hay!
"It does seem inhospitable to drag you out on a day like this," she began, but Roger cut her short.
"I like gray days, and it may be an extraordinary taste but I love the wind—in the open. Not city wind filled with dust, like the dead hopes of people blowing in your face, but clean, open wind like this."
Anne's face lighted with the pleasure of a shared sensation.
"So do I. It seems to blow all the tangles out of the world and give every one a chance to begin again—simply."
"I guess—maybe—that is it—only I hadn't thought of it as a beginning again. It always makes me feel courageous, like plowing straight on through everything, just as it is."
Anne did not look toward him instantly, but she felt him very sharply, so much taller than herself, broad, with that courageous, crisp hair, and his clear blue eyes that could look so different according to his mood. They would be wide and blue now, with a light in them as if Roger were turning it upon this "everything" through which the wind gave him the courage to plunge. He would be looking straight ahead, his chin up, ready. Anne turned a little, and he was looking exactly like that. She felt that she knew him very well, and then, that he was rushing into the wind, away from her, leaving her behind.