He had turned, waving his free hand to them, and darted away.
Lee laughed scornfully.
"Any one he happens to meet!" she exclaimed. "He's headed straight for the garden, and there he'll just happen to meet Phyllis. She was speaking of her tomatoes at breakfast, and saying that they ought to be ripening and that she was going to have a look at them."
"Lee, darling," said Renier, "nobody can possibly see us. And when Mr. Heartbeat left us alone in the front room it was a frightfully long time ago. And sometimes a fellow's arms get to aching with sheer emptiness, and—and, 'this is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks——'"
"Are mostly birches and larches hereabouts," said Lee, and, with a happy laugh, she drifted into a pair of arms that closed tightly about her. And, "It doesn't matter if anybody does see us," she said.
It was characteristic of Herring that he should enter the garden by leaping over the fence. It was also characteristic that he should catch his foot on the top rail and fall at full length in a bed of very beautiful and much cherished phlox.
Phyllis, in the path near by, gazed at the fallen man with mirth and anxiety.
"Hurt?" she asked.