“So you got home before me?” he said, shaking himself and squeezing his cap out as he spoke.
“Yes; we came straight.”
“It was lovely in the meads, wasn’t it?” said he, with an odd glance at me.
“It’s been lovely all this May,” said I.
“And that means a fat churchyard. Old Rottengoose says: ‘A cold May and windy makes a full barn and findy.’ A queer one, old Peg is. She’d die if she cast a woolen before the first of June. I wonder what she’d think of sitting under a hedge in a northeaster?”
I started a little and shot a look askance at my brother. Could he have seen us? But his next words reassured me.
“Or of falling asleep in the shade, as I did, till the rain on my face woke me up.”
“Then you didn’t see us pass——” I began and stopped.
“See what? I saw nothing but my eyelids and the sky through ’em.”
I gave a sigh of relief. My feelings toward Zyp were boyish and bashful and innocent enough, heaven knows; but in the shadow of my rough past they were beginning to glimmer out so strange and sweet that the merest suspicion of their incurring publicity filled me with a shame-faced terror of ridicule that was agony.