She smiled;

“....  And let our winds
Kiss thy perfumed garments; let us taste
Thy morn and evening breath!...”

“Oh—­stop!  I can’t bear it,” he said, huskily; and, turning on his face, he kissed the grass, earth’s “perfumed garment,” snow-sprinkled with locust blossoms....

But the moment of passion left him serious.  “When I think of Mrs. Newbolt,” he said, “I could commit murder.”  In his own mind he was saying, “I’ve rescued her!”

“Auntie doesn’t mean to be unkind,” Eleanor explained, simply; “only, she never understood me—­Maurice!  Be careful!  There’s a little ant—­don’t step on it.”

She made him pause in his diatribe against Mrs. Newbolt and move his heel while she pushed the ant aside with a clover blossom.  Her anxious gentleness made him laugh, but it seemed to him perfectly beautiful.  Then he went on about Mrs. Newbolt: 

“Of course she couldn’t understand you!  You might as well expect a high-tempered cow to understand a violin solo.”

“How mad she’d be to be called a cow!  Oh, Maurice, do you suppose she’s got my letter by this time?  I left it on her bureau.  She’ll rage!”

“Let her rage.  Nothing can separate us now.”

Thus they dismissed Mrs. Newbolt, and the shock she was probably experiencing at that very moment, while reading Eleanor’s letter announcing that, at thirty-nine, she was going to marry this very young man.

“No; nothing can part us,” Eleanor said; “forever and ever.”  And again they were silent—­islanded in rippling tides of wind-blown grass, with the warm fragrance of dropping locust blossoms infolding them, and in their ears the endless murmur of the river.  Then Eleanor said, suddenly:  “Maurice!—­Mr. Houghton?  What will he do when he hears?  He’ll think an ‘elopement’ is dreadful.”

He chuckled.  “Uncle Henry?—­He isn’t really my uncle, but I call him that;—­he won’t rage.  He’ll just whistle.  People of his age have to whistle, to show they’re alive.  I have reason to believe,” the cub said, “that he ‘whistled’ when I flunked in my mid-years.  Well, I felt sorry, myself—­on his account,” Maurice said, with the serious and amiable condescension of youth.  “I hated to jar him.  But—­gosh!  I’d have flunked A B C’s, for this.  Nelly, I tell you heaven hasn’t got anything on this!  As for Uncle Henry, I’ll write him to-morrow that I had to get married sort of in a hurry, because Mrs. Newbolt wanted to haul you off to Europe.  He’ll understand.  He’s white.  And he won’t really mind—­after the first biff;—­that will take him below the belt, I suppose, poor old Uncle Henry!  But after that, he’ll adore you.  He adores beauty.”

Her delight in his praise made her almost beautiful; but she protested that he was a goose.  Then she took the little grass ring from her finger and slipped it into her pocketbook.  “I’m going to keep it always,” she said.  “How about Mrs. Houghton?”