The midges bothered him; he mopped his red face, tugged at the line, but the flies were fast in a hazel bush.
"Damn this sort of thing," he muttered, looking piteously after Geraldine.

She was already far away among the trees, skirts wrapped close to avoid briers, big straw hat dangling in one hand.
As she walked toward the Sachem's Gate she was swinging her hat and singing, apparently as unconcernedly as though care rested lightly upon her young shoulders.
Out on the high-road a number of her guests whizzed past in one of Scott's motors; there came a swift hail, a gust of wind-blown laughter, and the car was gone in a whirl of dust.

She stood in the road watching it recede, then walked forward again toward the house.
Her accustomed elasticity appeared to have left her; the sun was becoming oppressive; her white-shod feet dragged a little, which was so unusual that she straightened her head and shoulders with nervous abruptness.
"What on earth is the matter with me ?" she said, half aloud, to herself.
During these last two months, and apparently apropos of nothing at all, an unaccustomed sense of depression sometimes crept upon her.
At first she disregarded it as the purely physical lassitude of spring, but now it was beginning to disquiet her.

Once a hazy suspicion took shape--hastily dismissed--that some sense, some temporarily suppressed desire was troubling her.

The same idea had awakened again that evening on the terrace when the faint odour from the decanter attracted her.