Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/124

 scar on his temple and the intelligent blue eyes, and the springy walk, so unexpectedly easy and full of grace for a man of his size. No, one might as well have expected little Higgins the groom to say: "It is a night full of splendor." The men she knew—Anson's friends—never said such things. She doubted whether they would ever notice such a night, and if they did notice it, they would be a little ashamed of having done anything so unusual.

"The party is not a great success," he was saying.

"No."

"No one seems to be getting on with any one else. Mrs. Callendar ought not to have asked me. I thought she was shrewder than that."

Olivia laughed softly. "She may have done it on purpose. You can never tell why she does anything."

For a time he remained silent, as if pondering the speech, and then he said, "You aren't cold out here?"

"No, not on a night like this."

There was a silence so long and so vaguely perilous that she felt the need of making some speech, politely and with banality, as if they were two strangers seated in a drawing-room after dinner instead of in the garden which together they had made beneath the ancient apple-trees.

"I keep wondering," she said, "how long it will be until the bungalows of Durham creep down and cover all this land."

"They won't, not so long as I own land between Durham and the sea."

In the darkness she smiled at the thought of an Irish Roman Catholic politician as the protector of this old New England countryside, and aloud she said, "You're growing to be like all the others. You want to make the world stand still."

"Yes, I can see that it must seem funny to you." There