“I hope I did not hurt you much,” I say with concern, turning toward him to make my acknowledgments, “but I really am very much obliged to you; I believe that, if you had not come by, I should have been left there till bedtime.”

“It must have been a very unpleasant speech that you made to deserve so severe a punishment,” he says, looking back at me, with a kindly and amused curiosity.

I do not gratify his inquisitiveness.

“It was something not quite polite,” I answer, shortly.

We walk on in silence, side by side.  My temper is ruffled.  I am planning five distinct and lengthy vengeances against Bobby.

“I dare say,” says my companion presently, “that you are wondering what brought me in here now—­what attraction a kitchen-garden could have for me, at a time of year when not the most sanguine mind could expect to find any thing good to eat in it.”

“At least, it is sheltered,” I answer, shivering, thrusting my hands a little farther into the warm depths of my muff.

“I was thinking of old days,” he says, with a hazy, wistful smile.  “Ah! you have not come to the time of life for doing that yet.  Do you know, I have not been here since your father and I were lads of eleven and twelve together?”

“You were eleven, and he was twelve, I am sure,” say I, emphatically.

“Why?”

“You look so much younger than he,” I answer, looking frankly and unembarrassedly up into his face.

“Do I?” (with a pleased smile).  “It is clear, then, that one cannot judge of one’s self; on the rare occasions when I look in the glass it seems to me that, in the course of the last five years, I have grown into a very old fogy.”

“He looks as if he had been so much oftener vexed, and so much seldomer pleased than you do,” continued I, mentally comparing the smooth though weather-beaten benignity of the straight-cut features beside me, with the austere and frown-puckered gravity of my father’s.

“Does he?” he answers, with an air of half-surprised interest, as if the subject had never struck him in that light before.  “Poor fellow!  I am sorry if it is so.  Ah, you see”—­with a smile—­“he has six more reasons for wrinkles than I have.”

“You mean us, I suppose,” I answer matter-of-factly.  “As to that, I think he draws quite as many wrinkles on our faces as we do on his.”  Then, rather ashamed of my over-candor, I add, with hurried bluntness, “You have never been married, I suppose?”

He half turns away his head.

“No—­not yet!  I have not yet had that good fortune.”

I am inwardly amused at the power of his denial.  Surely, surely he might say in the words of Lancelot: 

        “Had I chosen to wed,
  I had been wedded earlier, sweet Elaine.”

“And you?” he asks, turning with an accent of playfulness toward me.

“Not yet,” I answer, laughing, “and most likely I shall have to answer ‘not yet’ to that question as often as it is put to me till the end of the chapter.”