Sometimes a sense of the unreality of it all and the dream stuff it was made of came over Brooke, and she wondered if the spell would hold or if the separation was not more sweet than the reality; but this mood never lasted long. Of the patient service of the farmer-on-shares she could no longer be ignorant, nor of the fact that he drew her eyes toward the landscape of which he had come to be an inseparable part. Unwittingly she found herself watching him day by day, though usually as a mere speck in the distance. At such times she was bewildered, and trembled at herself. Was it the poise of his head, and an occasional gesture as he stepped back to look at something that he had done, that reminded her of Lorenz and confused the two identities for the moment, or had the strain of the long winter of struggling warped her brain? Brooke was no analyst who had made the mental dissipation of the dissection of motives take the place of natural emotion. The ideal of her nature had its outlet; why not then the real? It was the natural man in Maarten that drew her, something beneath the surface, obliterating the bands of caste and the social grades that divided their normal positions, though for that, except for her father’s disastrous city career, she was equally born a child of the soil and its heredities. She avoided the hay-fields, now swept by the June snow-storm of daisies, and in spite of success and her friend’s companionship, was truly miserable for the first time, for she could neither understand nor throw off the spell she felt upon her. Self-respect is not oblivion, and is but a chilly comforter for youth. The frequent thunder-showers had forced a new necessity upon the Sign of the Fox. An open shed at least must be had to protect vehicles that needed cover, while their occupants were sheltered by either screened porch or welcomed in the neat kitchen itself; so that an old lumber room in the cow barn had been cleared, and furnished with rings for tying up, the drivers upon the upper road being chiefly of horses; for the chauffeur avoided the steep, uneven hills, which jarred the constitution of the car of Juggernaut unpleasantly, even in the downward trip. It chanced a little before this time that a party of young fellows, headed by Charlie Ashton, in his big Mercedes touring car, built for long-distance runs, had started for Gordon, where they were in demand for a tennis tournament. Ashton’s chauffeur turning ill and unfit at the last moment, they had beat about, and discussed the possibility of substituting one of their number for the professional, as they all had more or less experience; and the lot had fallen to Tom Brownell, who had joined the party for a brief vacation, at the end of which he was to take the position of city editor of the _Daily Forum_, a well-earned promotion for which his gift of discerning the true from the merely sensational peculiarly fitted him.