Supper was ready when they got home, so Edith had no chance to be solitary, and after supper Johnny Bennett dropped in. When he took his reluctant departure ("Confound him!" Maurice thought, impatiently, "he has on his sitting breeches to-night!") Maurice told Edith to come into the garden with him, and listen to the evening primroses; "They 'blossom with a silken burst of sound'--they _do_!" he insisted, for she jeered at the word "listen." "They don't!" she said, and ran down the steps, flitting ahead of him in the dusk like a white moth. In their preoccupation, they neither of them looked at Eleanor; sitting silently on the porch between Mr. and Mrs. Houghton. They went, between the box hedges, to the primrose border, and Maurice quoted: "Silent they stood. Hand clasped in hand, in breathless hush around! And saw her shyly doff her soft green hood, And blossom--with a silken burst of sound! "Let's clasp hands," Maurice suggested. "No, thank you," said Edith. And so they watched and listened. A tightly twisted bud loosened half a petal--then another half--and another--until it was all a shimmering whorl of petals, each caught at one side to the honeyed crosspiece of the pistil; then: "_There!_" said Maurice. "Did you hear it?"--all the silken disks were loose, and the flower cup, silver-gilt, spilled its fragrance into the stillness! "It was the dream of a sound," she admitted Her voice was a dream sound, too, he thought; a wordless tenderness for her flooded his mind, as the perfume of the primroses flooded the night. It seemed as if the lovely ignorance of her was itself a perfume! "'Tell Eleanor'! She doesn't know the wickedness of the world, and I don't want her to." He put his hand on her shoulder in the old, brotherly way--but drew it back as if something had burned him! That recoil should have revealed things to him, but it didn't. So far as his own consciousness went, he was too intent on what he called "the square deal" for Eleanor, to know what had happened to him; all he knew was that Edith, all of a sudden, was grown up! Her childishness was gone. He mustn't even put his hand on her shoulder! He had an uneasy moment of wondering--"Girls are so darned knowing, nowadays!"--whether she might be suspicious as to what that secret was, which she had advised him to "tell Eleanor"? But that was only for a moment; "Edith's not that kind of a girl. And, anyway, she'd never think of such a thing of me--which makes me all the more rotten!" So he clutched at Edith's undeserved faith in him, and said, "She'll never think of _that_." Still, she was grown up ... and he mustn't touch her. (This was one of the times when he was not worrying about Jacky!)