"Honestly, Ann, do you mean positively that you don't want me—now?" he asked me as he sent the car whirling into the sun setting over Old Harpeth.
"Not—now," I answered bravely, though I nestled a little closer to him. He seemed so good and strong and—certain.
"All right then, I'll take the next best and I'll come in to your farm circle as partner or competitor or any old thing that keeps me in your aura. I'll grow chickens with the Corn-tassels or—here we turn back for I want to get out again over that bit of mountain-path that leads to your citadel before twilight."
"Put me out at the gate, Matt. I want to walk up," I said, and held to it against his protest. I finally made him see that I really was not equal to another "rocking" over the road, and I stood and watched him drive the huge car away from me down the Riverfield ribbon.
"I'm afraid I love him and just don't know it," I said to myself, as I stood at the big gate and watched him going away from me into life as I had known it since birth until twenty-four hours past. And from that vision of my past I turned in the sunset light of the present and began to walk slowly up the long avenue into my future. "I've never known anything but dancing and motoring and being happy, and how could that teach any woman what love is?" I queried as I stopped and picked up a small yellow flower out of a nest of green leaves that some sort of ancestral influence must have introduced to me as dandelion, for I had never really met one before. I felt a pale reflection of the glow I had experienced when I took the two warm pearls in my hands in the morning.
Then suddenly something happened that thrilled me first with interest and then with—I don't know what to call it, but it was not fear. A fierce little wind, that was earthy and sweet, but strong, ruffled across my path and up into the tops of the elms, and with a bit of fury tore down an old bird's-nest and flung it at my feet. It was soft and downy with bits of fur and hair and wool inside, but it was all rent in two.
"I wonder if I can hold my Elmnest steady on the limb when—" I was saying to myself unsteadily, with a mist in my eyes for the small wrecked home, when from somewhere over my left shoulder there came Pan's reedy call, and it ended with the two Delilah notes that I had thought I heard in the early morning. It was with no will of my own that I answered with that coo which I had heard Mr. G. Bird singing on the stage of the Metropolitan in my dawn dream. Also I crashed rapidly through the bushes in the direction of the call that this time came imperatively and without the coo.
"To your left and then straight toward the oak-tree," came human words from Pan in quick command and direction. "Hurry!"
With a last struggle with the briars I broke out into a small open space under the spreading branches of the old oak and upon a scene of tragedy, that is, it was almost tragedy, for the poor old sheep was lying flat with pathetic inertia while Adam stood over her with something in his arms.
"It's the fine Southdown ewe I persuaded Rufus to trade for one of the precious hogs," he said, with not so much as a word of greeting or interest personal to me in his voice or glance, but with such wonderful tenderness that I came close to him because I couldn't resist it. "She dropped twin lambs last night and she is down with exhaustion. They are getting cold, and I want to take her right up to the barn where I can bed her on hay and get something hot into all three. Can you cuddle the lambs and carry them while I shoulder her?" As he spoke he held out his armful to me without wounding me by waiting for my consent.