Her boy's smile became a laugh at the deliberate manner of her sarcasm.
"Oh, cut it out, Mother mine," he said. And though she tried to hold stiffly away from him, he hugged her and kissed her and pulled her down beside him on a wicker seat.
She could not get away from his encircling arm and probably she did not wish to.
"Ben, I've had a most disagreeable day," she declared. "Everybody within fifteen miles knows that you flew into the village with a strange girl."
"They said she was pretty, didn't they?"
"I can't leave the house without somebody stopping me and asking me about it, and I'll have to order the telephone taken out if this goes on. I can hardly bear to answer it any more. I called on Miss Melody, but she had gone to town, and that hopeless Mrs. Whipp babbled about your attentions. I don't want you to break the apple blossoms anyway."
"All right, honey, I won't. They're nearly gone; but I shall always love apple blossoms. They're fragrant like her spirit, pink and white like her, wholesome like her, modest like her. You see she has always been kept in the background. No one has taken the bloom from her freshness. She has had blows, has come in contact with some of the world's mud, but it washed away and disappeared under her own purity."
Mrs. Barry looked into the speaker's flashing eyes. "My poor boy," she said at last. "I wonder whether you're crazy or whether you're right. What am I going to do!"
"Of course I don't know what you're going to do," he returned, his lips and voice suddenly serious. "It depends largely upon whether you want my future wife to hand out ice-cream cones to the trippers at Keefeport."
"What do you mean now?" Mrs. Barry asked it severely.