“Mrs. Mansfield,” he said, looking squarely at her, “I’ve got somethin’ to ask of you, an’ I’m goin’ to do it while Mariella’s away.”
“That so?” said Mrs. Mansfield.
The color in her cheek deepened almost to a purple. She put one hand up to her face, and with the other nervously wrinkled the corners of the leaves of her novel. She lowered her lids resolutely to hide the sudden joy in her eyes.
“I guess you know what I’ve been comin’ here so much for. I couldn’t help thinkin’, too, that you liked the idea an’ was sort of encouragin’ me.”
Mrs. Mansfield threw one hand out toward him in a gesture at once deprecating, coquettish and helpful.
“Oh, you!” she exclaimed, laughing and coloring more deeply. There was decided encouragement in her honest blue eyes under their sandy lashes.
“Well, didn’t you, now?” Mr. Grover leaned toward her.
She hesitated, fingering the leaves of her book. She turned her head to one side; the leaves swished softly as they swept past her broad thumb; the corners of her mouth curled in a tremulous smile; the fingers of her other hand moved in an unconscious caress across her warm cheek; she remembered afterward that the band across the bay on the long pier, where the races were, was playing “Annie Laurie,” and that the odor of wild musk, growing outside her window in a box, was borne in, sweet and heavy, by the sea winds. It was the one perfect moment of Mrs. Mansfield’s life—in which there had been no moments that even approached perfection; in which there had been no hint of poetry—only dullest, everyday prose. She had married because she had been taught that women should marry; and Mr. Mansfield had been a good husband. She always said that; and she did not even know that she always sighed after saying it. Her regard for Mr. Grover was the poetry—the wine—of her hard, frontier life. Never before that summer had she stood and listened to the message of the meadow-lark with a feeling of exaltation that brought tears to her eyes; or gone out to gather wild pink clover with the dew on it; or turned her broad foot aside to spare a worm. Not that Mr. Grover ever did any of these things; but that love had lifted the woman’s soul and given her the new gift of seeing the beauty of common things. No one had guessed that there was a change in her heart, not even Mariella.
It was well that Mrs. Mansfield prolonged that perfect moment. When she did lift her eyes there was a kind of appealing tenderness in them.
“I guess I did,” she said.