Above them in the mottled sunshine on the lawn they could see little Oscar running, then stopping and listening, like some sprite escaped from the river alders. The man watched him springing over the turf, his little shirt fluttering in the breeze, and gradually his head sank. Then he straightened himself, and taking his wife’s hand led her back along the river path into the meadow. “Ned Boyce is a bad-tempered little fellow: he irritated and exasperated Oscar until with the heat and all that he clutched him. We must think so at any rate. I’ll lick it out of him, if I catch him at it!” He ended with this feeble, masculine threat, this desire to take his exasperation out on somebody else--to be paid for his distress of mind. “But it frightens me to think of your coming here and thinking of doing such a thing!” He turned his mood of reproach directly to her. “If you had seen Ned lying there so white--it was whole minutes before he opened his eyes,”--she protested; and then it seemed to come over her in a wave that in her struggle with this evil she was alone,--her husband did not really understand what it meant. To him it was trouble, like difficulty with servants,--something which his buoyant nature refused to take altogether seriously. For him there was always a way out of a situation: to her there was no avenue out in this situation. She took her hand from his arm and stepped forth steadily by herself. She had done him wrong! In his slower, less vivid mind, the tragedy was printing itself. He no longer could talk comfort. Something heavy and hard settled down on his spirit: he saw himself and this tender woman caught in a rocky bed of circumstance. In the gloom of his mind he could see no light, and he groaned. Thus, together they mounted the slope of the lawn to the pleasant cottage, side by side and yet withdrawn from one another. As they reached the terrace little Oscar darted out, like a fleet arrow, from the big syringa where he had lain hidden. His voice rippled with joy: “You’re so slow, you two! Do you see what I got? A piece of Mary’s Sunday cake. And _that’s_ what’s left. I’ll give you that, mamma, if you’ll be good.” “Take him away!” his mother exclaimed fretfully. “I can’t look at him yet. I have had enough for one day.” She entered the house and locked herself in her room. Later, when her husband knocked, she opened the door; she had been sitting before her dressing-table, looking vacantly into the mirror. “I don’t suppose you want to go over there to their party?” he ventured timidly. “I’ll send Tom over with a note.” “Why would I not go? Why should I stay at home? Is this the sort of place a woman would want to stay in all the time, do you think? Heavens! if anything could make me forget for one quarter of an hour _this_ idea,--anything, I would go--and sin for it too! Do you understand?”