Billy and the Watermelon were young and light of foot and soon outdistanced the stout Bartlett, who did his gallant best to keep up with the nimble Henrietta, but found that the years of good living told against him.
Henrietta waited politely for him at the stone wall which Billy had just scaled and the Watermelon jumped.
"What are we hurrying for?" asked Bartlett, removing his hat to wipe his heated brow.
"I am sure I don't know," laughed Henrietta. "Monkey see, monkey do, I suppose. That is why there is such a thing as style. No one thinks."
"If we waited here," suggested Bartlett, "our dinner would come to us."
"As the office to the man," agreed Henrietta.
"Precisely."
Henrietta sat down on the wall and Bartlett leaned beside her, gazing over the field to the distant woods. He felt thoroughly comfortable and contented. No matter what happened now, Batchelor could not reach the city by Saturday. The cotton ring was saved.
The scene before them was a typical Maine landscape, rugged, hilly, beautiful, with the long shadows of approaching evening creeping across the fields. From where they rested, the farm seen from the road was hidden from sight. The whole place seemed desolate, primeval, with a beauty and a charm that were all its own.
Henrietta drew a quick sigh of pleasure and fell silent, with dreaming eyes wandering into the mysterious shades of the distant woodland, her hunger for the time forgotten. The place, the time of day, just at eventide, suggested romance, the one man and the one woman, and the world not lost, but just attained. She wished she was Billy, young and foolish and pretty, and that Bartlett was the Watermelon, long-limbed, broad-shouldered, with the glory of youth that sees only glory down the pathway of the future.