Standing among the dancing greens, she looked back at him. The wind blew her clear pink skirts fluttering toward him. Her gentle “Aren’t you coming?” saved him; but the sort of smile she gave, threatened—seemed diabolic. But she had seen, in his moment of unhappy hesitation, that he feared to lose her; and her spirits leaped, her eyes lighted, her mouth flowered in that sudden bewildering smile. Down on the slopes of the hot, wet lawns they heard the cicadas singing. The full green tops of trees moved on a melting sky. This riotous out-of-doors conspired with her against him. He felt, if she went on smiling like that, she would have him. “For a moment I thought you weren’t coming!” she called. “I’m not,” he said. The color fluttered into her face, but “Not coming?” she bravely mocked at him. He stood resolute, but his hard, long look at her made her heart beat strongly. “I thought you were going in,” he said. He expected to see her flare away from him through the oleanders, but, instead, she came toward him, dragging her steps like an unhappy child. That he should be the one to make her look like that! He was fierce with himself. “You know I want to come!” he said angrily. “I’d come anywhere with you!” He caught himself desperately. He had a feeling that he must save them. “But—but you said you were going in. I think we’d better.” He clutched for banalities. “Let’s have a game of billiards. Let’s ring up the club about the meet. Let’s—” he seized upon the next idea with relief—“I’ve never heard you sing since that first night.” She looked up in bewilderment, fretted by the trivialities. “But you said you didn’t like it—that I had no feeling!” He winced, knowing this was just his reason. He had remembered how the emptiness of her lovely voice had seemed to estrange them. The sound of it in the dead boundary of walls might break the live enchantment of her presence. “Oh, give me another chance!” He tried to take it lightly. But their consciousness read into his words multiple meanings. They came to the glass door in silence. He followed her through the glass room, where she plucked a tuberose whose sweet scent pursued him at once to vex and delight him. She seemed to gather more beauty by that perfume. In her ignorance she was reckless with her power. In her unconscious beguilement she was perilous to be near. He hoped she would sing badly—off key—anything to help him escape her. She took a sheet of music, a modern arrangement of an old song. The first notes startled him. Did her pliant voice take color from the music, or had it found a tenderness of its own? It came at first uncertainly. The deep tones drew out tremulous, the high notes quivering with too keen intensity: but it lived; it interpreted; it was significant.