"I was dreaming we were building them again when I was delirious just after I was hurt, it seems. I thought that I was back in Kansas and was little again. The prairie was all brown as it is in late summer, brown billows of dried grass which let you see the chips of limestone and flint scattered on the ground beneath; and in the hollows there were acres and acres of sunflowers, three times as tall as either Jim or I, and with stalks as thick as a man's wrist, where Jim and Betty and I ... and you, Miss Sherrill, were playing."
"I?"
"We cut paths through the sunflowers with a corn knife," Alan continued, not looking at her, "and built houses in them by twining the cut stalks in and out among those still standing. I'd wondered, you see, what you must have been like when you were a little girl, so, I suppose, when I was delirious, I saw you that way."
She had looked up at him a little apprehensively, afraid that he was going to say something more; but his look reassured her.
"Then that," she hazarded, "must have been how the hospital people learned our name. I'd wondered about that; they said you were unconscious first, and then delirious and when you spoke you said, among other names, mine—Connie and Sherrill."
He colored and glanced away. "I thought they might have told you that, so I wanted you to know. They say that in a dream, or in delirium, after your brain establishes the first absurdity—like your playing out among the sunflowers with me when we were little—everything else is consistent. I wouldn't call a little girl 'Miss Sherrill,' of course. Ever since I've known you, I couldn't help thinking a great deal about you; you're not like any one else I've ever known. But I didn't want you to think I thought of you—familiarly."
"I speak of you always as Alan to father," she said.
He was silent for a moment. "They lasted hardly for a day—those sunflower houses, Miss Sherrill," he said quietly. "They withered almost as soon as they were made. Castles in Kansas, one might say! No one could live in them."
Apprehensive again, she colored. He had recalled to her, without meaning to do so, she thought, that he had seen her in Spearman's arms; she was quite sure that recollection of this was in his mind. But in spite of this—or rather, exactly because of it—she understood that he had formed his own impression of the relation between Henry and herself and that, consequently, he was not likely to say anything more like this.
They had walked east, across the damp, dead turf to where the Drive leaves the shore and is built out into the lake; as they crossed to it on the smooth ice of the lagoon between, he took her arm to steady her.