his hands—brush the backs of them, slowly, moistly, with her mouth, lingeringly. She was terribly frightened. She thought to herself: “I am going crazy. I am losing my mind. There is something the matter with me. I wonder how I look. I must look queer.”
She said something to make him look up at her. His glance was mild, undismayed. So this hideous thing did not show in her face. She kept her eyes resolutely on the book. At half-past eight she closed her book suddenly. “I’m tired. I think it’s the spring coming on.” She smiled a little wavering smile. He rose and stretched himself, his great arms high above his head. Selina shivered.
“Two more weeks,” he said, “is the last lesson. Well, do you think I have done pretty good—well?”
“Very well,” Selina replied, evenly. She felt very tired.
The first week in March he was ill, and did not come. A rheumatic affliction to which he was subject. His father, old Johannes DeJong, had had it before him. Working in the wet fields did it, they said. It was the curse of the truck farmer. Selina’s evenings were free to devote to Roelf, who glowed again. She sewed, too; read; helped Mrs. Pool with the housework in a gust of sympathy and found strange relief therein; made over an old dress; studied; wrote all her letters (few enough), even one to the dried-apple aunts in Vermont. She no longer wrote to Julie Hempel. She had heard that Julie was to be married to a Kansas man named Arnold. Julie herself had not
