The guilty pair were unable to preserve their natural coloring. They turned crimson, and each showed a courteous willingness to let the other be the first to speak.

"You've been to Carrytown," said Herring. "I saw you start. You raced down to the float. And in your rivalry to see which should board the Streak first, it looked as if you were going to knock each other overboard. Renier, he won, and you, Miss Lee, were annoyed. When you returned from Carrytown, you had long, pensive, anxious faces. Renier stepped ashore and, in helping you ashore, gave you both hands. When a girl whom I have seen climb a tree after a baby owl accepts the aid of a man's two hands in stepping from a solid boat to a solid float, there is food for thought. Having landed, you proceeded direct to the head of the Darling family and were for some time engaged with him in solemn discourse. A paper was shown him. From a distance it looked as if it might be some sort of a license—a license to hunt and be hunted, perhaps—"

"But it wasn't," said Lee suddenly, and she thrust her hand under Renier's arm. "If you must know, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, it was a license to love and be loved. So there!"

She was no longer blinking, nor was Renier. They looked so loving and proud that it was Herring's turn to feel embarrassment. Then he said:

"I only meant to be a tease. If I'd really thought anything—I wouldn't, of course; none of my darn business. But I'm awfully glad. I've hoped all along it would happen. It's the best ever. Am I to be secret as the grave or can I tell—any one I happen to meet?"

"Give us ten minutes to tell mamma," said Lee, "and then consider your lips unsealed."

Herring had drawn from his pocket a stop-watch and set it going.

"Ten minutes," he said. "Thanks awfully! And good luck!"

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.