Cynthia's son went to dinner with the Ainslees. He walked with Mr. Ainslee while Nan and her brother went on ahead. Nan was almost noisily gay but no one seemed to be at all aware of it. The dinner was delicious and went off without the least bit of embarrassment. At the table Nan was as suddenly still as she had been noisily gay. She let the men do the talking while she scrupulously attended to their wants. Once she forgot herself and while he was talking studied the face of Cynthia's son. Her father caught her at it and smiled. This made her flush and to even up matters she deliberately put salt instead of sugar into her father's after-dinner cup of coffee. Whereupon he, tasting the salt, made an irrelevant remark about handwriting on the wall. CHAPTER IX GREEN VALLEY MEN Close on the heels of Lilac Sunday comes Decoration Day. And nowhere is it observed so thoroughly as in Green Valley. The whole week preceding the day there is heard everywhere the whir of sewing machines. New dresses are feverishly cut and made; old ones ripped and remade. Hats are bought, old ones are retrimmed. Buggies are repainted and baby carriages oiled. Dick does a thriving business in lemons, picnic baskets, flags, peanuts and palm-leaf fans, these being things that Jessup's chronically forget to carry, regarding them as trifles and rather scornfully leaving them to Dick, who makes a point of having on hand a very choice supply. This fury of work gradually dies down, to be followed by such an epidemic of baking that the old town smells like a sweet old bakery shop with its doors and windows wide open. There is then every evening a careful survey of the flower beds in the garden, a rigid economy of blossoms and even much skilful forcing of belated favorites. The last day is generally given over to hat buying, the purchasing of the last forgotten fixings and clothes inspections. From one end of the town to the other clotheslines, dining-room chairs, porch rockers and upstairs bedrooms are overflowing with silk foulards, frilled dimities, beribboned and belaced organdies, not to mention the billows of dotted swiss and muslin. On short clotheslines, stretched across corners of back and side porches or in the tree-shaded nooks of back yards, may be seen hanging the holiday garments of Green Valley men. But what most catches the eye are the old suits of army blue flapping gently in the spring breeze with here and there a brass button glinting. There are a surprising number of these suits of army blue just as there are a surprising number of graves in the little Green Valley cemetery over which, the long year through, flutters the small flag set there by loving hands each Decoration Day. There are all manner of cleaning operations going on in full view of anybody and everybody who might be interested enough to look. For there is no streak of mean secretiveness in Green Valley folks.