They were awakened from the dream by a call, and after what seemed to Marley a long time, he finally remembered the voice as Lawrence's.
"We must go back," he said reluctantly. "How long have we been gone?"
"I don't know," said Lavinia. He heard her sigh.
Marley pulled the boat in the direction whence came the hallooing voice; he had quite lost all notion of their whereabouts. But presently they saw the lights of the pavilion, and then the dark figures of the men, and the white figures of the girls on shore.
As they pulled up and Marley sprang out of the boat to the landing stage, Lawrence said:
"We thought you'd been drowned," said Lawrence.
Marley and Lavinia drove home together in silence. In the light of the moon, the road was silver, and the fields with their shocks of wheat were gold.
"I don't know what ails Lavinia," said Mrs. Blair to her husband as he sat on the veranda after dinner the next day. The judge laid his paper in his lap, and looked up at his wife over his glasses.
"M--yes," replied Mrs. Blair, prolonging the word in her lack of conviction, "I guess so."
"Don't you know?" the judge demanded in some impatience with her uncertainty.
"Well, then, what makes you think she isn't?"
"Oh, I don't know," replied Mrs. Blair, "she seems so quiet, that's all."
"Lavinia is not a girl given to excitement or demonstration," said the judge, lapsing easily into the manner of speech he had cultivated on the bench.
"No, that's so," assented Mrs. Blair. "But she's always cheerful and bright."
"No, I wouldn't exactly call it that, but she seems preoccupied--rather wistful I should say, yes--wistful." She seemed pleased to have found the right word.
"Oh, she's all right. That picnic last night may have fatigued her. I presume there was dancing."
"I don't know that we should let her go out that way." The judge took off his glasses and twirled them by their black cord while he gazed across the street, apparently at some dogs that were tumbling each other about in the Chenowiths' yard. The judge had a subconscious anxiety that they would get into Mrs. Chenowith's flower beds.
"You and I used to go to them; they never hurt us," argued Mrs. Blair.
"No, I suppose not. But then--that was different."