He vanished in a flurry of seeming obedience.  He went openly through the front door of the little house into the side yard, but paused not until he reached its back door, where he stood waiting.  When he guessed he had been there fifteen minutes he prepared to change his lurking place.  Winona would be coming for him.  He stepped out and looked round the corner of the little house, feeling inconsequently the thrill of a scout among hostile red Indians as described in a favoured romance.

The lawn between the little house and the big house was free of searchers.  He drew a long breath and made a swift dash to further obscurity in the lee of the Penniman woodshed.  He skirted the end of this structure and peered about its corner, estimating the distance to the side door.  But this was risky; it would bring him in view of a kitchen window whence some busybody might observe him.  But there was an open window above him giving entrance to the woodshed.  He leaped to catch its sill and clambered up to look in.  The woodshed was vacant of Pennimans, and its shadowy silence promised security.  He dropped from the window ledge.  There was no floor beneath, so that the drop was greater than he had counted on.  He fell among loose kindling wood with more noise than he would have desired, quickly rose, stumbled in the dusk against a bucket half filled with whitewash, and sprawled again into a pile of soft coal.

“Gee, gosh!” he muttered, heartily, as he rose a second time.

Both the well-spread pallor of the whitewash and the sable sprinkling of coal dust put him beyond any chance of a felicitous public appearance.  But he was safe in a dusky corner.  He remained there, breathing heavily.  At last he heard Winona call him from the Penniman porch.  Twice she called; then he knew she would be crossing to the little house to know what detained him.  He heard her call again—­knew that she would be searching the four rooms over there.  She wouldn’t think of the woodshed.  He sat there a long while, steadily regarding the closed screen door that led to the kitchen, ready to mingle deceptively with the coal should any one appear.

At last he heard a bustle within the house.  There were hurried steppings to and fro by Winona and her mother, the heavy tread of the judge, a murmur of high voices.  The Whipples must have come, and every one would be at the front of the house.  He crept from his corner, climbed to the floor from where it had been opened for wood and coal, and went softly to the kitchen door.  He listened a moment through the screen, then entered and went noiselessly up the back stairs.  Coming to the head of the front stairway, he listened again.  There were other voices in front, and he shrank to the wall.  He gathered that only the Whipple stepmother and Patricia had come—­no other Whipples, no preacher.  It might not have been so bad.  Still he didn’t want to be there.