“There’s one thing sure about Eden ... in spite of the squabbles and disagreements of the elders, the place is a children’s paradise.”

“That’s only because they have all nature for their backyard—­no thanks to their elders,” Hildreth answered, looking up into my face with a quick smile, “the grown-ups find misery wherever, they go.”

“Does that mean that you are unhappy?”

“I suppose I should say ‘no.’”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Neither do I, then.”

Again that sweet, tantalizing, enigmatic droop of her mouth’s corner.

We strolled further ... into the fields again ... with linked comradely hands.  It seemed that she and I had been born brother and sister in some impossible pastoral idyll.

* * * * *

A change in our spirit again.  A fresh desire to romp.

“Let’s play just as if we were children, too.”

“Tag!  You’re it!” and I touched her arm and ran.  She ran after me in that curious loping fashion peculiar to women.  I turned and wound like a hare.  She stopped, breathless.  “That’s no fair!” she cried, “you’re running too fast.”

“Well, then, I’ll almost stand still, then see if you can catch me!”

She made at me, shouting, her face flushed with the exercise.  I ducked and swerved and doubled.

“You’re quite quick and strong,” she exclaimed, admiringly, as I caught her by the shoulders.

I stooped over, hunching my back.

“Come on, play leap-frog,” I invited.  She hesitated, gave a run at me, put both hands on my back, but caught her left leg on my neck.  We collapsed in a laughing heap, she on top of me.

Slowly we disentangled ourselves.  I reached a hand and helped her up.

“I’m no good at that, either ... let’s stop playing ...  I’m tired.”

We caught sight of a little man crossing a field, trotting like a dog out hunting on his own.  He looked back twice as he went.

“—­wonder if he saw us?”

“—­perhaps—­but what matter if he did?”

“Then I hope he’s not a fellow Edenite.  You have no idea what an undercurrent of gossip runs in this place.”

We sank down together on a small knoll under the low-spreading branches of a live oak.  We watched the man who we thought had observed our antics bobbing off down the road, as if running for exercise.

We sat quite apart, at first.  Then our hands met in instinctive fondness ... met in the spirit in which we had been romping together.

“You’re like a small boy, Johnnie.”

“And you haven’t acted so very much like a grown woman, have you, Hildreth?” It was the first time I had called her by her first name.

“Can you, or anyone else, tell me just how grown women do act?  I myself don’t know, yet I’m a woman.”

I drew closer to her as if drawn by some attractive power.  A stray wisp of her hair lit across my cheek stingingly.  Then the wind blew a perfumed strand of it across my lips and over my nostrils.