It had indeed. It had come rushing on a broad stream of light and poured itself along Hugh’s veins. The look in his face increased rather than diminished. But Ariel had done her best, all she knew, to relieve the intensity in Hugh’s dark eyes. Her knees began to tremble. She did not want Hugh to see that she was trembling. She would be utterly ashamed if he should see. So she sat down suddenly, on the edge of the daybed, and commenced to part the flowers from the wood loam, and from each other. Her hands were browned by this one afternoon’s sun and air. They were narrow hands and small, with rather square-tipped, very straight fingers. Hugh recalled Joan’s hand above his own on his steering wheel. It was white and beautiful and exquisitely molded, a sculptor’s dream. But these little hands—their appeal was in their simplicity, in their graceful but inconspicuous motions, not in their form and modeling. If he should put his own hands down over them now they would be quite lost, all the magic and grace of their movements stilled away, and they would feel to him like the grubby hands of any little girl who had been out picking wild flowers in the woods. He would put his hands down over hers. He would do that. He would find out how it felt to capture grace like a bird under one’s fingers,—perhaps to destroy it in the grasp of it and so prove it an illusion. Not real. Not actual. Not like Joan’s beauty, inescapable. He would prove that Ariel’s charm for him was something he could always control, could catch and subdue and hide away from himself, under his hand. It was only for a breath or so that he had Ariel’s hands under his own, crushed down in the medley of spring flowers and damp earth. But the grace, the charm was not controlled by his will or his hold. It escaped without a flutter of struggle. It flowed up into the surprised lift of Ariel’s head, the rising of her eyelids, and spread a shimmer of green-gold light in the quickly widening pupils of her eyes, raised to his. Suddenly he discovered, and she knew that he had discovered it, that she was trembling. What Ariel did not realize was that Hugh was trembling too, a little. He released her hands. “I didn’t mean to hurt the flowers,” he muttered. “Sorry if I have.” And he commenced to help her in her sorting. “I’m going to put these shortest-stemmed ones in a saucer,” Ariel explained. “Isn’t there something special, don’t you think, about little white and yellow violets? Secret and special? They sort of break my heart....” He should hear how her voice didn’t tremble. She repeated the silly words to make sure that he heard how it didn’t: “They sort of break my heart.” “Yes? Well, _spring_ sort of breaks _my_ heart,” Hugh responded. Chapter XXI