Eugene stood still looking at her, his face radiant and glowing red. "Dorothy!" he stammered, and then Dorothy straightened herself suddenly, though she kept her face averted, flung up her head, caught up her blue skirts again, and made as if she would pass on without another word. Eugene, with his face all at once white, and his head proudly raise, stood aside to let her pass. "'Tis a warm day for the season," he said, with his old graceful courtesy. But Dorothy looked up at him again as she neared him in passing, and her sweet mouth was quivering like a frightened baby's, and the tears were in her blue eyes, and no man who loved her could have let her go by; and certainly not this fiery young Eugene. Suddenly, and with seemingly no more involvement of wills or ethics than the alders in their blossoming, the two were in each other's arms, and their lips were meeting in kisses. This fair and demure daughter of Puritans might well, as she stood there in her lover's embrace, being already, as she was, the betrothed bride of another, have been accounted fickle and false, but perhaps in a sense she was not. Never had she forgot or been untrue to her first love-dreams, which Eugene had caused, but had held to them with that mild negative obstinacy of her nature which she could not herself overcome. Now it was to her as if she were reconciled to her true lover, and was faithful instead of false; and less false she surely was to her own self. Right contentedly had she loved for a time Burr's love for her and his tenderness, and had been stirred thereby to passion, but now she loved this other man for something better than her own sweet image in his eyes. Never a word she said, but her hat slipped down on her shoulders, hanging by its blue strings, and she let her head lie on Eugene's shoulder, with a strange sense of wontedness and of remembering something which had never been. And, also, all Eugene's fond words in her ear seemed to her like the strains of old songs which were past her memory. Burr's, although she had listened happily, had never seemed to her like that. They stood together so for a few minutes, while the alder-flowers shook out sweetness, as from perfumed garments, at their side, and a bee who had left his hive and winter honey, and made that day another surprise of spring, hummed from one white raceme to another and then was away, disappearing in the blue air with a last gleam of filmy wing as behind a sapphire wall. Neither of the lovers had knowingly heard the bee's hum, but when it ceased the silence seemed to make an accusing sense audible to them. They let each other go and stood apart guiltily, as if some one had entered the lane and was spying upon them. Dorothy spoke first, without raising her pale little face, all drooped round with her curls. "What shall I do?" she said, like a child. She was trembling, and could scarcely control her tongue.