“Some of these blooms want cutting very badly,” was his only answer, “they will fall in another day.” Then there was silence save for the clicking of the scissors, the humming of the bees, the good-night song of the birds, and the laughter and cries from the field. Unconsciously, as the basket filled, the steps of Dorothy had turned the gable of the house. The merry crowd was hid from view. The garden here sloped to the river side, and by its brim was a rustic seat. Dorothy sank upon it weariedly.
“I confess I’m tired,” she exclaimed “I seem to have been on my feet for a week,” and she put out the tiniest point of a shoe-toe and contemplated it ruefully. “Now, what do you mean, Mr. Pinder, standing there swinging that basket like one of those boats in a fair that make you dizzy to look at them? Can’t you find a seat somewhere?”
Tom looked all around. He might have found a seat by climbing on the branch of an adjacent tree. Some such thought may have crossed his mind, for by that magic of association that passes the wit of man came to him the couplet that he had read long ago:
“Fain would I climb, but that I fear to fall,”
with its answering
“If thy heart fail thee, do not climb at all.”
Tom did not climb. He sat instead on the edge of the garden seat, as far from Dorothy as space permitted.
“I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘Mr. Pinder’,” he said. “I never feel quite sure you are not making mock of me.”
Dorothy had taken a rose from the basket and was looking for leaves to bind it with.
“Well you see, you are getting rather too big for me to call you Tom. And besides, you are a man now, and besides, oh!—lots of things.”