"Well, get ready. I'll have the buckboard here in five minutes." He rose, shaking off the blossoms which powdered his coat like snow.
"There's some on your hair, ma; they're so pretty."
Indiana rose lazily from the grass, also shaking off a shower of blossoms, and leaned against a low-spreading apple tree, extending her arms on the branches each side of her.
Glen gazed at her, still thrumming his mandolin.
"Do you think you'll come to Narragansett with us, this summer?" said Indiana, looking idly up through the branches.
"What for?" said Glen, gloomily. "To see you dance and flirt with a lot of--of simpering idiots."
Indiana laughed. Every time she moved, the blossoms fell upon her shoulders, neck and hair.
There was silence, broken only by the thrumming of the mandolin and the twitter of birds from the recesses of the trees.
"It's sad, the way those blossoms fall on you, Indiana."
Indiana shook the branches, and peeped out laughing through the thick shower which followed.
"You look like a part of the tree," said Glen. "Like a wood-sprite, a Dryad--or something."
"Or something," said Indiana, "is very illustrative to the mind."
"I like you best as you are here about the farm," continued Glen, watching her steadily with his dark eyes, and continuing his eternal thrumming. "Just as you are now, in that simple dress your mother made for you, with your hair hanging like that--I always liked your hair hanging--do you remember, Indiana?"
"It went rather hard with me, when you first put it up, and wore long dresses. It seemed as though that were going to be the end of all our good times."
"No; you were the same old Indiana, although you looked more--the woman. Then you discovered your own power, and you took to breaking hearts. You were very apt at that business, for one so young."
"You forget," said Indiana, with a sly smile, "there was Grandma Chazy."
"That's true. An old soldier in camp put you on to all the principal maneuvers."
They both laughed, looking around cautiously, like naughty children, as though Mrs. Bunker might be hiding somewhere among the trees.
"I fought shy of you for awhile, then--I was young and unworldly." From Glen's seriously reminiscent expression, he might have been looking back upon another self of twenty or thirty years ago. "And I could not justify your practices at that time. I don't know whether you noticed the difference in me?"