In the train they held each other's hands under the cover of a newspaper; and sometimes Maurice's foot touched hers, and then they looked at each other, and smiled--but each was wondering: his wonder was, "What made her offended at Edith?" And hers was, "How can he like to be with an eleven-year-old child!" Their talk, however, confessed no wonderings! It was the happy commonplace of companionship: Mrs. Newbolt and her departure for Europe; would Mrs. O'Brien be good to Bingo? what Maurice's business should be. Then Maurice yawned, and said he was glad that the commencement exercises at Fern Hill were over; and she said she was glad, too; she had danced, she said, until she had a pain in her side! After which he read his paper, and she looked out of the window at the flying landscape. Suddenly she said: "That girl you danced with last night--you danced with her three times!" she said, with sweet reproach--"didn't know we were married!--she wasn't a Fern Hill girl. She told me she had been dancing with my 'nephew.'" "Did she?... Eleanor, look at that elm tree, standing all alone in the field, like--like a wineglass full of summer!" For a moment she didn't understand his readiness to change the subject--then she had a flash of instinct: "I believe she said the same thing to you!" "Oh, she got off some fool thing." The annoyance in his voice was like a rapier thrust of certainty. "I knew it! But I don't care. Why should I care?" "You shouldn't. Besides, it was only funny. I was tremendously amused." She turned and looked out of the window. Maurice lifted the paper which had been such a convenient shelter for clasping hands, and seemed to read for a while. Then he said, abruptly, "I only thought it was funny for her to make such a mistake." She was silent. "Eleanor, don't be--that way!" "What 'way'? You mean"--her voice trembled--"feel hurt to have you dance _three times_, with a girl who said an uncomplimentary thing about me?" "But it wasn't uncomplimentary! It was just a silly mistake anyone might make--" He stopped abruptly, for there were tears in her eyes--and instantly his tenderness infolded her like sunshine. But even while he was making her talk of other things--the heat, or the landscape--he was a little preoccupied; he was trying to explain this tiny, ridiculous, lovely unreasonableness, by tracking it back to some failure of sensitiveness on his own part. It occurred to him that he could do this better if he were by himself--not sitting beside her, faintly conscious of her tenseness. So he said, abruptly, "Star, if you don't mind, I'll go and have a smoke."