"No."
He passed his thin hand across eyes and forehead.
She folded her arms under her breast and hung far over the shadow-dappled wall half-screened in young vine-leaves. Over her pink sun-bonnet and shoulders the hot spring sunshine fell; her face was in shadow; his, under the full glare of the unclouded sky, every ravage starkly revealed. And she could not turn her fascinated gaze or crush out the swelling tenderness that closed her throat to speech and set her eyes glimmering.
The lids closed, slowly; she leaned there without a word, living through in the space of a dozen pulse-beats, the agony and sweetness of the past; then laid her flushed cheek on her arms and opened her eyes, looking at him in silence.
But he dared not sustain her gaze and took refuge from it in a forced gaiety, comparing his reappearance to the return of Ulysses, where Dame Art, that respectable old Haus-Frau, awaited him in a rocking-chair, chastely preoccupied with her tatting, while rival architects squatted anxiously around her, urging their claims to a dead man's shoes.
She strove to smile at him and to speak coolly: "Will you come in? I have finished the vines and presently I'm going to dig. Wait a moment"—looking behind her and searching with one tentative foot for the ladder—"I will have to let you in—"
A moment later she met him at the grille and flung it wide, holding out her hand in welcome with a careless frankness not quite natural—nor was the nervously vigorous handshake, nor the laughter, light as a breeze, leaving her breathing fast and unevenly with the hue of excitement deepening on lip and cheek.
So, the handshaking safely over, and chatting together in a tone louder and more animated than usual, they walked down the moist gravel path together—the extreme width of the path apart.
"I think," she said, considering the question, with small head tipped sideways, "that you had better sit on this bench because the paint is dry and besides I can talk to you here and dig up these seedling larkspurs at the same time."
"Don't you want me to do some weeding?"