“What have you got there?” he asked me, although all I had, as he saw perfectly well, was the branch of lilac that I had bent down to smell, but love is a child at language, speaks nonsense, asks stupid questions, makes insipid replies—“Don’t you know a lilac when you see one?”—and means to convey just the opposite of impertinence.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” he said. Rather he whispered, so close to my ear that his lips almost touched me, for the voices on the porch reminded us that we were not alone here as we had been in the fog. “I never can remember,” said a woman, “whether it’s feed a cold and starve a fever or the other way around just like I can’t remember whether a ring around the moon means good weather or a storm.”

“I guess I was thinking about you,” I said, although this was not true. I had been thinking not of him, but of myself in whom the blood had defecated its black humors and had left only love but love as an envelope that was as yet empty.

“You’re not sore, then?” He meant: Was I not angry, then, that my last glimpse of him until now had been when, shirt-tail out, he hotfooted it for the bus to Boston without a backward glance and had not written me a letter? No, I could tell him honestly, I had not been angry. I had been sore; my heart had been skinned by his silence. I had learned from his mother (who believed, for the simple reason that we were neighbors and about the same age, that Nathan and I were friends, but never dreamed that when she uttered his name my skin erupted into goose-flesh) that he would not be home again until the end of the term for he had got a job working in the Brookline Economy Store and all his leisure time was occupied. But I had not failed to call at the post-office once a day for two months in the hope of some word from him. The soreness had gradually disappeared, like a headache, and though I was not conscious of my relief, I was able now to pass the post-office with indifference. But just as the headache has not really gone but has been hidden under sleep and requires only a sharp noise to cast off its covering and meddle with our nerves again, so Nathan’s appearance—weeks before I had expected him—reminded me of the shame of his neglect, renewed the sensation of his kisses, and made me, as before, stretch upwards as if I stood on tiptoe to scrutinize his birthmark, sudden through the lighted window. And I knew I had not ceased to love him, that the wrappings in which I had laid away my hopes were not winding sheets, were only masquerade, out of which they came now with their sweet, young faces.