Honor had mounted two steps, to be under the roof of the porch, and now, turning sharply in her gladness, the wet slipper slipped again, and she would have fallen if he had not caught her.
"Skipper!"
"It's—it's all right!" said Honor in a breathless whisper. "I'm all right, Jimsy. Let me——"
But Jimsy King would not let her go. He held her fast with all his football strength and all his eighteen years of living and loving, and he said over and over in the new, strange voice she had never heard before, "Skipper! Skipper! Skipper!"
"Jimsy ... what—what is happening to us? Jimsy, dear, we never before—Jimsy, are we—are we—Is this being—in love?"
And the mocking-bird of the morning, mounted on the wet Bougainvillæa on the summerhouse in Honor's garden, explained to them in a mad, exultant, thrilling burst of song.
CHAPTER VI
"At least," Mildred Lorimer wept, "at least, Stephen, make them keep it a secret! Make them promise not to tell a living soul—and not to act in such a way as to let people suspect! I think"—she lifted tragic, reproachful eyes to him—"you ought to do what you can, now, considering that it's all your fault."