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4 For although Mrs. Finchley, who was of an especially shrewd and discerning turn socially, had at first been dubious over the attentions being showered upon Clyde by her daughter and others, still observing that Clyde was more and more being entertained, not only in her own home by the group of which her daughter was a part, but elsewhere, everywhere, was at last inclined to imagine that he must be more solidly placed in this world than she had heard, and later to ask her son and even Sondra concerning him. But receiving from Sondra only the equivocal information that, since he was Gil and Bella Griffiths' cousin, and was being taken up by everybody because he was so charming—even if he didn't have any money—she couldn't see why she and Stuart should not be allowed to entertain him also, her mother rested on that for the time being—only cautioning her daughter under no circumstances to become too friendly. And Sondra, realizing that in part her mother was right, yet being so drawn to Clyde was now determined to deceive her, at least to the extent of being as clandestinely free with Clyde as she could contrive. And was, so much so that every one who was privy to the intimate contacts between Clyde and Sondra might have reported that the actual understanding between them was assuming an intensity which most certainly would have shocked the elder Finchleys, could they have known. For apart from what Clyde had been, and still was dreaming in regard to her, Sondra was truly being taken with thoughts and moods in regard to him which were fast verging upon the most destroying aspects of the very profound chemistry of love. Indeed, in addition to handclasps, kisses and looks of intense admiration always bestowed when presumably no one was looking, there were those nebulous and yet strengthening and lengthening fantasies concerning a future which in some way or other, not clear to either as yet, was still always to include each other.

Summer days perhaps, and that soon, in which he and she would be in a canoe at Twelfth Lake, the long shadows of the trees on the bank lengthening over the silvery water, the wind rippling the surface while he paddled and she idled and tortured him with hints of the future; a certain forest path, grass-sodden and sun-mottled to the south and west of the Cranston and Phant estates, near theirs, through which they might canter in June and July to a wonderful view known as Inspiration Point some seven miles west; the country fair at Sharon, at which, in a gypsy costume, the essence of romance itself, she would superintend a booth, or, in her smartest riding habit, give an exhibition of her horsemanship—teas, dances in the afternoon