"Why not?" demanded Jimmie. "Where's the harm? And I reckon Mrs. V. knows how to take care of herself."
"Who said she didn't?" snapped Nanny.
Toward nine Courtney and Basil went out on the veranda. It was a perfect August night. The honeysuckle in great masses upon the rail was giving forth an odor that quieted them like pensive music. Under the trees and among the bushes the now pale, now bright lamps of the "lightning bugs" shone by scores and hundreds. There was a moon, sailing high and almost full. She thought she had never been so happy in her life. At former happy times there was in her no such capacity to appreciate and enjoy as experience had now given her. And what an ideal companion Basil was—so much the man of the world, wise, experienced, yet simple and amazingly modest. And how marvelously they fitted into each other's moods! She had never thought to find a human being with just the right combination of qualities—one who could be serious—always in an interesting way—and also as light as the lightest.
"Look at those elder blossoms," said Basil in a low voice, as if louder tones might break the spell and dissolve the beauty, delicate, fragile, unreal.
Elder bushes were the outer wall of the eastern shrubbery; their flowers, soft, feathery mats, deliciously sweet to smell, looked at that distance and in that light like a wall of snow. Courtney and Basil descended from the veranda, strolled across the lawn. She lifted her head, seemed to drink in the beauty with her whole face, and to exhale it in a newer, subtler loveliness and perfume.
"How sweet the boxwood hedge is after to-day's rain."
As they neared the water's edge, all other perfumes yielded to the powerful, heavy, sensuous odor of the locust blossoms, in white clusters above the bench on which they presently sat. They were silent, gazing across the lake where, in contrast to the darkness and silence of their shore, lay the town, a shimmer of light, a murmur of confused sounds mingling pleasantly. Down the lake, far out beyond the edge of the heavy shadow flung by the trees, a boat was coming, the man rowing, the girl playing the mandolin and singing. The tinkling of the mandolin and the fresh young voice floated over the waters to Courtney and Basil. She drew in her breath sharply, with a sense of alluring danger hovering. The boat drew nearer; the sounds were clearer—clearer, more tender, more moving. The mandolin tinkled. The free, sweet young voice sang: "I want you—ma honey!—yes I do! I want you—I want you——"
She clasped, clinched her hands in her lap. Basil started up. "I can't bear it!" he cried. "I can't!"
"No—no!" she exclaimed, and her strange look suggested a soul drowning. "Go—go quickly!" And drawing her white shawl about her shoulders, she fled into the house.
XI