"Now for it!" said Joan suddenly to herself. She dropped her hand negligently on the leaves, close to his. She resisted the temptation to jerk it back as soon as she was aware of its contact with another. Very slight the contact was, no more than the touch of a leaf. She pretended not to notice it; but the blood sang in her ears, her cheeks burned--she wished suddenly that he would take her hand, if he was going to; hold it tight.... Heavens! What was happening to her? She _wanted_ the touch of his hand; she liked it! Did she care for him, then? Was this being in love--already? "Joan," he whispered. "Look at me!" The spell was broken. She jumped to her feet. "Come, we must be getting back," she said hurriedly. "It is late." "Ah, but how cold you are!" "Yes, I am, a little," she said innocently. "These woods are damp." But all the way home, beneath her relief, lingered a sense of annoyance, of disappointment. "What a prig I am," she thought disgustedly. "It would be all over now if I'd only--let him!" That night she wrote at unusual length to Mr. Nikolai. It was almost like writing to herself; and Joan frequently felt the need of seeing what she was about set down in black and white, for greater clarity. She had not meant to tell Mr. Nikolai of her imminent engagement till the thing was _fait accompli_; but she knew that everything would be settled by the time her letter reached him. She wanted to be reassured about her odd and unexpected emotion during the contact of her hand with Eduard Desmond's. Was it so, then, that people fell in love, just suddenly without any warning? And had the mind nothing to do with it whatever? For mentally she was not altogether pleased with herself. CHAPTER XV The idea that Betty and her mother were eyeing her somewhat askance troubled Joan not a little. In her heart of hearts she preferred women to men, and believed their friendship more of a compliment. She would have liked to make a friend of Mrs. Desmond, had there been time, envying Betty's camaraderie with her mother; although Mrs. Desmond presented a golfing, bridge-playing, sporting type of motherhood quite new to her experience. There was a peculiar intimacy and freedom among all this group of people, who seemed to spend most of the year together either in Philadelphia or Aiken or Ormond or these long-established country-places surrounding the Longmeadow Hunt Club. It was like a curiously ramified family, in which husbands and wives seemed to have changed partners rather frequently, and were still in process of changing. It was Joan's first glimpse of a society in which married women hold the center of the stage rather than young girls, and she was just a little shocked by it.