Edith, watching the retreating figure, never guessing those unshed tears, said, despairingly, to herself, "I suppose I ought to go home with her?" She dropped her pitchfork; "I'll come back after dinner, boys," she said; "I must look after Eleanor now." "Quitter!" Maurice jeered; but Johnny said, "I'm glad she's gone; it's too much for a girl." His eyes followed her as she went running over the field to catch up with Eleanor, who, on the way back to the house, only poke once; she told Edith that flattery was bad taste the cup overflowed! "Men hate flattery," she said. "Hate it?" said Edith, "they lap it up!" When the two young men sat down under an oak for their noon hour, with a bucket of buttermilk standing precariously in the grass beside them, John said again, anxiously, "It was too hot for her; I hope she won't have a headache." "She always has headaches," Maurice said, carelessly. "What!" said Bennett, alarmed; "she's never said a word to me about headaches." "Oh, you mean Edith? I thought you meant Eleanor. Edith never had a headache in her life! Some girl, Johnny?" "Has that just struck you?" said John. Maurice fished some grass seeds out of the buttermilk, took a deep draught of it, and looked at his companion, lying full length on the stubble in the shadow of the oak. It came to him with a curious shock that Bennett was in love. No "calf love" this time! Just a young man's love for a young woman--sound and natural, and beautiful, and right.... "I wonder," Maurice thought, "does she know it?" It seemed as if Johnny, puffing at his pipe, and slapping a mosquito on his lean brown hand, answered his thought: "Edith's astonishingly young. She doesn't realize that she's grown up." There was a pause; "_Or that I have._" Maurice was silent; he suddenly felt old. These two--these children!--believing in love, and in each other, were in a world of their own; a world which knew no hidden household in the purlieus of Mercer; no handsome, menacing, six-year-old child; no faded, jealous woman, overflowing with wearisome caresses! In this springtime world was Edith--vigorous, and sweet, and supremely reasonable;--and _never_ temperamental! And this young man, loving her.... Maurice turned over on his face in the grass; but he did not kiss the earth's "perfumed garment"; he bit his own clenched fist. He was very silent for the rest of their day in the field for one thing, they had to work at a high pitch, for then were blue-black clouds in the west! At a little after three Edith came out again, but not to help. "I had to put on my glad rags," she said, sadly, "because some people are coming to tea. I hate 'em--I mean the rags."