"You were a dear boy, Rudolph, when I first knew you—and what I liked was that you never made love to me. Of all the boys I have known and helped to form, you were the only sensible one—the only one who never presumed. That was rather clever of you, Rudolph. It would have been ridiculous, for even arithmetically I am older than you.
"Wouldn't it have been ridiculous, Rudolph?" she demanded, suddenly.
"Not in the least," Musgrave protested, in courteous wise. "You—why,
Polly, you were a wonderfully handsome woman. Any boy——"
"Oh, yes!—I was. I'm not now, am I, Rudolph?" Mrs. Ashmeade threw back her head and laughed naturally. "Ah, dear boy that was, it is unfair, isn't it, for an old woman to seize upon you in this fashion, and insist on your making love to her? But I will let you off. You don't have to do it."
She caught her skirts in her left hand, preparatory to going, and her right hand rested lightly on his arm. She spoke in a rather peculiar voice.
"Yes," she said, "the boy was a very, very dear boy, and I want the man to be equally brave and—sensible."
Musgrave stared after her. "I wonder—I wonder—? Oh, no, that couldn't be," he said, and wearily.
"There must be some preposterous situations that don't come about."
* * * * *
And afterward he strolled across the lawn, where the locusts were shrilling, as if in a stubborn prediction of something which was inevitable, and he meditated upon a great number of things. There were a host of fleecy little clouds in the sky. He looked up at them, interrogatively.