"Yes," she told him.
"When is your next crowd coming?" he wondered.
"There aren't going to be any more crowds," Nanny informed him.
"That's nice. It's pleasanter this way."
Nanny's poor heart longed to ask why but it dared not.
So then she drifted and didn't care. Though she prayed a little miserably at times for peace and a home shore. They seemed to meet by accident on the sunny summer roads and whenever they did they strolled on aimlessly but contented. Because she was now so quiet and kind he told her things that he had never told to any one else. She marvelled at the simple heart of him, its freedom from self-consciousness. She had not dreamed that there was anywhere in the world a grown-up man like that.
Had he been different she could never have lived, it seemed to her, through the fearful hour of humiliation on the Glen Road. She stooped for a spray of scarlet sumach one early autumn afternoon. They had been looking through the hedges for the first hazel nuts and he was standing beside her when, in some way, the little picture worked its way out of her soft silk blouse and fell at his feet, face up.
Fright as terrible and as cold as death laid its hand on Nanny's heart. It seemed to her that she never again could raise her eyes to his. Fortunately her body went through its mechanical duties. She bent, her hand picked up the picture, and her voice of its own accord was explaining:
"This belongs to you. I took it the day I was looking over the pictures at Grandma Wentworth's. I should, of course, have returned it long ago but I kept neglecting to do it. It's one of the dearest child pictures I have ever seen."
She raised her eyes then, eyes as careless as she could make them. Fright kept the flame of bitter shame from her cheeks and the tremor out of her voice. She held the little picture out to him, forcing her eyes to meet his.