She laughed up in his face in sheer pleasure.
“And I have something particularly interesting to me, and not important to you, to tell in return. We have an event in our family—an agreeable happening as to results, although it comes by a dark and crooked road—or so mamma persists in saying.”
March had propelled her into the open track and stopped as she said this to lean forward and peer into the saucy face. A disagreeable—an absurd—thrill passed over him. Had he lost Hetty?
“An event! Accomplished or prospective?”
“Both!” chuckled Hester.
“Is it an engagement?” bringing out the word courageously.
The question was never answered. A vigorous onward push had brought them into the moonlit area surrounding the king apple tree. Thor rushed forward, bellowing ferociously at a long black body that lay half under, half beyond the dipping outward branches, now weighted almost to the ground with growing fruit.
“Homer!” shouted March to the figure retreating toward the garden. “Come back! hurry!” And, hastily, to Hester: “I will send you home with him and go for the police. Don’t be frightened. It is only a drunken tramp, or may be a sleeper. In either case he cannot stay here. These are my father’s grounds.”
Hester had not uttered a sound, but the slight figure, bent toward the recumbent man, had a strained intensity of expression words could not have conveyed. Her eyes were fixed, as by the fascination of horrified dread—one small hand plucked oddly at her throat.
“Take her home, Homer!” March ordered, “and say nothing to alarm the ladies. I’ll attend to him!”