"Alex smiles down at her, with his way that always seemed to me so much less that of living every minute than of watching it live itself about him.
"'May I venture to remind you,' he says—like a little thin edge of something, paper, maybe, that's smooth as silk, but that'll cut neat and deep if you let it—'May I venture to remind you that your aunt is announcing our engagement to-night? I think that will have escaped your mind.'
"'Yes,' Robin says, simple, 'it had. Everything had escaped my mind except this poor little thing here. Alex—it's early. He'll sleep after a little. But I must go down with him. What did you come in?' she asked Insley, quiet.
"I told her I'd go down, and she nodded that I was to go, but Chris clung to her hand and it was her that he wanted, poor little soul, and only her. Insley had come up in the doctor's rig. She and I would join him with the child, she told him, at the side entrance and almost at once. There was voices in the house by then, and some of the young folks was coming downstairs and up from the tennis-court for tea. She went into the house with Chris. And I wondered if she thought of the thing I thought of and that made me glad and glad that there are such men in the world: Not once, not once, out of some felt-he-must courtesy, had Insley begged her not to go with him. He knew that she was needed down there with Chris and him and me—he knew, and he wouldn't say she wasn't. Land, land I love a man that don't talk with the outside of his head and let what he means lay cramped somewheres underneath, but that reaches down and gets up what he means, and holds it out, for you to take or to leave.
"Mis' Emmons was overseeing the decorations in the dining room. The whole evening party she had got right over onto her shoulders the way she does everything, and down to counting the plates she was seeing to it all. We found her and told her, and her pity went to the poor fellow down there at the Cadozas' almost before it went to Chris.
"'Go, of course,' she said. 'I suppose Alex minds, but leave him to me. I've got to be here—but it's not I Chris wants in any case. It's you. Get back as soon as you can, Robin.'
"I must say Alex done that last minute right, the way he done everything, light and glossy. When Robin come down, I was up in the little seat behind the doctor's cart, and Alex stood beside and helped her. A servant, he said, would come on after us in the automobile with a hamper, and would wait at the Cadozas' gate until she was ready to come back. Somehow, it hadn't entered anybody's head, least of all, I guess, Alex's own, that he should come, too. He see us off with his manners on him like a thick, thick veil, and he even managed to give to himself a real dignity so that Robin said her good-by with a kind of wistfulness, as if she wanted to be reassured. And I liked her the better for that. For, after all, she was going—there was no getting back of that. And when a woman is doing the right thing against somebody's will, I'm not the one to mind if she hangs little bells on herself instead of going off with no tinkle to leave herself be reminded of, pleasant.
"We swung out onto the open road, with Chris sitting still between the two of them, and me on the little seat behind. The sunset was flowing over the village and glittering in unfamiliar fires on the windows. The time was as still as still, in that hour 'long towards night when the day seems to have found its harbour it has been looking for and to have slipped into it, with shut sails—so still that Robin spoke of it with surprise. I forget just what she said. She was one of them women that can say a thing so harmonious with a certain minute that you never wish she'd kept still. I believe if she spoke to me when I was hearing music or feeling lifted up all by myself, I wouldn't mind it. What she'd say would be sure to fit what was being. They ain't many folks in anybody's life like that. I believe she could talk to me any time, sole unless it's when I first wake up in the morning; then any talking always seems like somebody stumbling in, busy, among my sleeping brains.
"For a minute Insley didn't say anything. I was almost sure he was thinking how unbelievable it was that he should be there, alone with her, where an hour ago not even one of his forbidden dreams could have found him.
"'Beautifully still,' he answered, 'as if all the things had stopped being, except some great thing.'