“Yes. What is it? Who do you want?”
Pape was returned to the quandary of the maid possibility. Before he could decide what to answer the suction of wind from the hall drew around the edge of the door a fluttery bit of black skirt.
“I want you, Jane,” he hazarded.
Curiosity, surprise or exasperation ruled her—perhaps a combination of the three. Her young-white face in its old-black bonnet followed the skirt around the door edge, high as his own and so close that her breath, warm and sweet as a summer zephyr off a clover field, blew upon his cheek.
“You?” she gasped, as before, out under the trees.
“Again,” he finished for her with the briefest of bows.
She narrowed the crack and moved across it, evidently to protect the room from his inspection. Not exactly a “welcome to our happy home” was her next offering, although in her natural tones.
“So you followed me home last night, after all! How dared you? What is the meaning of your espionage?”
His courage was lit by the blaze of her look.
“There’s a particular meaning to it that I hope you won’t find so unwelcome. I’ve whizzed hereward to inform you that a gang of grave-diggers are exercising their muscles ‘neath the shade of the sheltering poplars where you and Kicko were planting bones last evening.”