(Come and gone with the dry rapidity of fingers snapped, she had thought, "The point is, that other people may be more clever than mothers, but nobody else cares enough, always, always to try to understand!")
"I thought I'd come up and walk back with you," she offered.
"I haven't got very many," said Paul, abashed, looking down at the few, blue, bloom-covered balls in the bottom of his shining tin pail. "I was trying to hurry up and get enough for supper, anyhow."
Marise in spite of herself, moved by pity for his confusion, offered him a way out. It always seemed to her too dreadful for anyone not to have a way out, even if it implied a fib. "Weren't there very many on the bushes?" she asked.
But he refused it with a characteristic integrity. "Oh yes, there were lots there," he said.
A silence fell. The little dog, sensitively aware of something wrong, whined uneasily, and pawed at Paul's hand. But Paul did not look down at him. He stood, his bare feet wide apart, the empty pail in his hand, looking down the beautiful green slope of the pasture, golden now in the long rays from the sun poised low on the line of the mountains opposite.
Marise looked at him, seeing nothing in all the world but that tanned, freckled, anxious little face. With what an utter unexpectedness did these moments of crisis spring on you; something vital there, and no warning, no chance to think.
"Anything the matter, Paul?" she said gently.
He nodded, silent.
"Anything you can tell Mother?" she asked, still more gently.