Free White Narcissus by Raymond Knister

place for shelter from too rough winds, from sun, and allnoise and unquiet they looked into; but there seemed no path leading down to it.
    They had scarcely walked fifty feet on along the lane before they met Carson Hymerson, both forks on his shoulder, evidently going home to dinner. The small, thick, stooped man looked at them quickly, suspiciously once, mumbled something, and had passed.
    They looked at each other, and Richard Milne smiled.
    “He won’t be expecting you home for dinner now,” Ada said with a soft drawl, “so you’d better come home with me. Never mind,” she said with sudden decision as he began to excuse himself. “I want you to meet Mother, and it’s no inconvenience.”
    His acceptance was curiously tentative, tacit. “You seem to know Carson.”
    She laughed a little. “Yes, but I wonder whether I do. One thinks one knows this one and that one, when, if one did, things would be different; there would be no flaws in intercourse.”
    “Obviously here there are. But don’t you think that it is possible to know people too well for their comfort and yours?”
    “Perhaps, if you know them without sympathy. But then if you didn’t sympathize you couldn’t know anyone perfectly. Could you? And if you did know a person perfectly you would be compelled to sympathize with him.”
    “Perhaps.” Richard Milne was not tempted to explore this syllogism. “Still, people don’t like to be understood. Not really. Not too well; and perhaps it is fortunate I don’t understand Carson Hymerson. But he does cause me to speculate.”
    “I think my father does him, too,” she said with an intonation of sadness. “If only such people would resign themselves not to understand. They seem to think that since myfather is what they call ‘queer,’ they are licensed for any means to attain their ends, the petty ends of trickery. They do manage to bother him; it can’t be denied. I can’t see why they should attempt to do so, or what they hold against him. I suppose to see anyone unhappy arouses a sadistic tendency in coarser minds.” Her voice trembled.
    “Ada,” broke in Richard Milne, his tones sharp and yet heavy, “you just tell me when anything overt – but, of course, nothing can happen, save by the rarest mischance. I’d just like to see them bother you.” Ada looked up at the savageness of his tone. A thwarted anger struggled within him at the thought that this girl should be forced to consider such a trifle as he denominated the rest of the community, the rest of the world.
    Her eyes met his intense gaze, then looked away and filled, while she caught her breath. “Dear boy …” she murmured. “Nothing’s going to happen.”
    “Promise me you will,” he insisted.
    “Yes. I shall be glad of any help you can give.” She spoke in the steady tones of one unwilling to reveal an invisible burden.
    “Ada!” He stopped, unsatisfied, as though uncertain of what he wished to say to her, or of how he was to say it. “You don’t seem to realize my right – haven’t I earned it? – to want to protect you, in all the years you’ve ruled my life.” He laughed shakily. “Why, my dear, I wouldn’t be here. … Love is like –”
    “Hush!”
    “Like an intermittent fever.” He had stopped in his preoccupation.
    “Hush!” She stepped back toward him, taking his hand. “We are nearly there. Let’s talk about – anything – dinner,until you can eat it! You’re too late for the locust blossoms.” She waved her hand above them.
    They walked along together beneath the high, grey-barked trees with their fine, small leaves. The upper branches showed dead, broken off straight and blunt on the tops of the trees, and would have been even more conspicuous by contrast when the great white blooms of locust were interspersed among them.
    When the pair reached the road the dust was deeper, but they saw that their shoes already had been covered by the deposit on the grasses of the lanes. In