John Stuart Webster knew now what was missing in his scheme of things, as with reverent and wistful eyes he watched their meeting.
“Forty years old,” he thought, “and I haven't spoken to a dozen women that caused me a second thought, or who weren't postmistresses or biscuit shooters! Forty years old and I've never been in love! Spring time down that little path and Indian summer in my old fool heart. Why, I ought to be arrested for failure to live!”
The lovers were walking slowly, arm in arm, back along the path by which the girl had come, so with a courtesy and gentleness that were innate in him, Webster stepped out of sight behind the statue of Old Hickory; for he did not desire, by his mere presence, to intrude a discordant note in the perfect harmony of those two human hearts. He knew they desired that sylvan path to themselves; that evidently they had sought their early morning tryst in the knowledge that the square was likely to be deserted at this hour. Therefore, to provoke selfconsciousness in them now savoured to John Stuart Webster of a high crime and misdemeanour, for which reason he was careful to keep General Jackson between himself and the lovers until they had gone by.
The young man was speaking as they passed; his voice was rich, pleasant, vibrant with the earnestness of what he had to say: with a pretty little silver-mounted walking stick he slashed at spears of grass alongside the path; the girl was crying a little. Neither of them had seen him, so he entered a path that led from them at right angles.
He had proceeded but a few feet along this trail when, through a break in the shrubbery ahead of him, he saw two men. They were crossing Webster's path and following a course paralleling that of the lovers in the broad main walk. Brief as was his glimpse of them, however, Webster instantly recognized the two Central Americans he had seen in the steamship ticket office two days previous.
They were not walking as walk two men abroad at this hour for a constitutional. Neither did they walk as walk men churchward bound. A slight, skulking air marked their progress, and caused Webster to wonder idly what they were stalking.
He turned into the path down which the two men had passed, not with the slightest idea of shadowing them, but because his destination lay in that direction. The Central Americans were approximately fifty yards in advance of him as he turned in their wake, and at sight of them his suspicion that they were stalking something was quickened into belief.
Both men had forsaken the gravelled path and were walking on the soft velvet of blue grass lawn that fringed it!
“Perhaps I'd better deaden my hoof beats also,” John Stuart Webster soliloquized, and followed suit immediately.
He had scarcely done so when the men ahead of him paused abruptly. Webster did likewise, and responding—subconsciously, perhaps, to the remembrance of the menace in the glance of the man with the puckered eye—he stepped out of sight behind a broad oak tree. Through the trees and shrubbery he could still see the lovers, who had halted and evidently were about to part.