"Do you remember this place, Flavia? Well, all that is over for him."
Beside them sloped away a brown, frost-seared field; in its centre still showed the outline of a baseball diamond, with the bags forgotten at the bases. Flavia's heart contracted sharply, the reins escaped her grasp. For the moment memory and vision fused; she saw the straight, slender pitcher poised with arms raised above his brown head, saw his laughing glance go questing down the field, and the swift, graceful movement that launched the ball with unerring unexpectedness. And because she could not speak without inadvertently lashing Corrie, she sat mute.
She did not know how long it was before he spoke, with the new steady seriousness so strange to meet in him.
"Where are we getting to, Other Fellow? Because we have got to get somewheres, you know; we don't stand still. Gerard will go away to his own home, soon. You and father and Isabel and I can't just sit here looking at each other, like we've been doing."
Gerard would go away, soon. That was the sentence that gripped Flavia. Go, without seeing her, without pursuing the purpose he had shown her in the fountain arbor? It seemed so impossible that the thrill that shook her was not of fear, but of startled expectancy. Yet she answered Corrie with scarcely a pause, and with all tenderness.
"Dear, Isabel will not be here, for a little while," she told him, hesitatingly. "She is going South with Mrs. Alexander and Caroline. She, she needs the change."
"That's good," he approved. "She will be better off, away from here, and you will be better for her going. She worries us all with her fidgets."
Amazed, Flavia turned in her seat to regard him.
"Corrie!"