“Pat, I wish I knew. I’ve been horribly flippant about it but that was just to cover up. I really don’t know. I do like them both so much…Pat, is it ever possible to be in love with two men? It isn’t in books, I know…but in life? Because I do love them both. They’re both darlings. But, Pat, honestly, the minute I decide I like Bruce best I find I have a mind to Peter. And vice versa. That’s all I can say yet. Well, Norma’s wedding comes off next week. Judy is furious because they are going to rehearse the whole ceremony in the church the night before. ‘Nixt thing they’ll be rehearsing the funerals,’ she says. Judy will be simply mad with delight if you marry Donald. And yet she’ll die of sorrow when you go. When you go…that turns me cold. Oh, Pat, wouldn’t life be nice and simple if people never fell in love? I wish I could make up my mind between Bruce and Peter. But I just can’t. If I could only marry them both.”

The shrieks of an anguished car resounded from the yard and Rae ran down to welcome Bruce…or it may have been Peter.

The next afternoon Pat, as she expressed it, “put off Martha and put on Mary,” and hied herself to her Secret Field, although there was apply jelly to make and cucumbers to pickle. She went through the mysterious emerald light of the maple woods, where it seemed as if there must have been silence for a hundred years, and sat down on an old log covered with a mat of green moss in the corner of her field. It had changed so little in all the years. It was still her own and it still held secret understanding with her. But today something came between her soul and it. In spite of everything something touched her with unrest…the certainty of coming change, perhaps.

She looked up at a splash of crimson in the maple above her head. Another summer almost gone. There was a hint of autumn and decay and change in the air, even the air of Secret Field, with the purples of its bent grasses. Yes, she would marry Donald Holmes. She was quite sure she loved him. Pat stood up and waved a kiss to the Secret Field. When she next saw it she would belong to Donald Holmes.

She had intended to call at Happiness on her way home…she had not been there all summer…but she did not. Happiness belonged to things that were…things that had passed…things that could never return.