“What!” he said.  “Are they engaged?”

“Well, no; not yet.”

There was a little pause; then Maurice (this was one of the moments when he forgot Jacky’s future!) said, with great heartiness, “Old John’s in luck!” He and Mrs. Houghton were sitting on the porch in that somnolent hour after dinner, before she went upstairs to take a nap, and Maurice should go over to the Bennetts’ for singles with Johnny; Eleanor was resting.  Out on the lawn in the breezy sun and shadow under the tulip tree, Edith, fresh from a shampoo, was reading.  Now and then she tossed her head like a colt, to make her fluffy hair blow about in a glittering brown nimbus.

Maurice got up and sauntered over to her.  “Coming to see me wallop Johnny?”

“Maybe; if my horrid old hair ever dries.”

Maurice looked at the “horrid old hair,” and wished he could put out his hand and touch it.  He was faintly surprised at himself that he didn’t do it!  “How mad I used to make her when I pulled her hair!” Now, he couldn’t even put a finger on it.  He remembered the night of Lily’s distracted telegram, when he had taken Edith to Fern Hill, and she had “bet on him,” and had been again, just for an instant, so entirely the “little girl” of their old frank past, that she had kissed him!  “So, why can’t I touch her hair, now?” he pondered; “we are just like brother and sister.”  But he knew he couldn’t.  Aloud, he said, “Don’t be lazy, Skeezics,” and lounged off toward Doctor Bennett’s.  His face was heavy.

At the doctor’s, John, sitting on a gate post, waiting for him, yelled, derisively:  “You’re late!  ’Fraid of getting walloped?  Where’s Buster?”

“She’s forgotten all about you.  Get busy!” Maurice commanded.

They played, neither of them with much zest, and both of them with glances toward the road.  The walloping was fairly divided; but it was Maurice who gave out first, and said he had to go home. ("Eleanor’ll be hunting for me, the first thing I know,” he thought.)

“Tell Edith I’ll come over to-night,” Johnny called after him.

“I’m not carrying billets-doux,” Maurice retorted.  “I suppose,” he thought, listlessly, “it will be a short engagement.”  He went home by the path through the woods, and halfway back Edith met him—­the shining hair dried, but inclined to tumble over her ears, so that her hat slipped about on her head.  She said: 

“Johnny lick you?”

“Johnny?  No!  He’s not up to it!” They both grinned, and Maurice sat down on a wayside log to put a knot in a broken shoestring.  Edith sat down, too, trying to keep her hat on, and cursing (she said) the unreliability of her hair.  The shoestring mended, Maurice batted a tall fern with his racket.

“Eleanor’s sort of forlorn, Maurice?” Edith said.  “Generally is.”  He slashed at the fern, and she heard him sigh.  “That time she dragged me down the mountain took it out of her.”