My path led me up a slope where the trees, youngish still, like myself, were no saplings, however, but towered in a slender abandon toward the patches of cerulean sky overhead. They seemed to escort me, those tapering maples and sycamores with their feathery foliage, like a troop of young monks still fresh from their novitiate, still full of the sap of life. Somehow trees in a forest have always reminded me of monks chanting litanies and benedictions. The bass-note of all their murmurings is invariably so solemn. From the crest the land drops in a declivity and thence, soon abandoning the woodland in a fringe of bushes and underbrush, rolls on to the massive moundlike line of the aqueduct.
On a sudden I heard voices beneath me a little way down the declivity. And peering down with the delicious thrill of alertness that returns from primitive ages even to-day among trees, I perceived Alicia and Randolph with their backs to me in earnest colloquy.
My first impulse, naturally, was to hail them or to make some sort of monitory sound that might apprise them of my presence. But a sudden movement of Alicia's arrested all force or motion on my part.
Her hands shot forward and with a vehemence that was obviously not loverlike, she cried out in a tormented voice:
"But you've promised me that over and over again, 'Dolph! How many times"—she unconsciously shook him as she spoke, "how many times do you suppose you have promised me that you wouldn't drink and wouldn't play—that you'd give up going about with that set—that you'd leave it altogether? How many, many times?" she reiterated, with a pathetic note of indignation.
"A fellow can't quit cold like that," I barely heard the lad muttering—"got to have some friends!"
"Friends!" Alicia cried, in a voice of bitter exasperation. "Do you call Billy Banning and Tertius Cullen and Arthur Bloodgood friends? They're your worst enemies—almost criminals!" And on a sudden I realized that I was an eavesdropper and a flush of shame heated my cheeks. I was about to make a sound but my throat was dry and no sound came.
"Think what it would mean," took up Alicia, "if Uncle Ranny found it out—" and I could not choose but listen—"all that he has been to us—father and mother and everything else. Everything in the world he has given up for us," she cried with quivering lips, her voice thinning with passionate anguish. "His comfort, his leisure, his whole life he has sacrificed with a smile for us—for you and Jimmie and Laura and—and even me! Oh, 'Dolph, 'Dolph—do you suppose there are many such men in the world? And you want to break his heart by drinking and gambling and Heaven knows what else it might lead to?"
I write these words with shame. I had no business to hear them. I gathered my arrested forces to compel myself to move away, when I heard the boy's bass mutter:
"I know I'm rotten, 'Licia—rotten as they make 'em—but give me another chance, 'Licia—just one more, sweetheart—I tell you it's—"