“Oh, Blue,” said Red suddenly, withholding her steps, “suppose we didn’t go, and were to walk back just a little later, don’t you think we might meet—?” There was no name, but a sympathetic understanding.  It was Harkness of whom they thought.

“I’m sure he’s a great deal better looking than young Mr. Brown, and I think it’s unkind to mind the way he talks.  Since Winifred had her teeth done, I think we might just bow a little, if we met him on the road.”

“I think it would be naughty,” said Red, reflectively, “but nice—­much nicer than a grown-up picnic.”

“Let’s do it,” said Blue.  “We’re awfully good generally; that ought to make up.”

The sunset cloud was still rosy, and the calm bright moon was riding up the heavens when these two naughty little maidens, who had waited out of sight of the picnic ground, judged it might be the right time to be walking slowly home again.

“I feel convinced he won’t come,” said Blue, “just because we should so much like to pass him in these frocks.”

Now an evil conscience often is the rod of its own chastisement; but in this instance there was another factor in the case, nothing less than a little company of half tipsy men, who came along from the town, peacefully enough, but staggering visibly and talking loud, and the girls caught sight of them when they had come a long way from the pleasure party and were not yet very near any house.  The possibility of passing in safety did not enter their panic-stricken minds.  They no sooner spied the men than they stepped back within the temporary shelter of a curve in the road, speechless with terror.  They heard the voices and steps coming nearer.  They looked back the long road they had come, and perceived that down its length they could not fly.  It was in this moment of despair that a brilliant idea was born in the mind of Red.  She turned to the low open fence of the little cemetery.

“Come, we can pretend to be tombs,” she cried, and whirled Blue over the fence.  They climbed and ran like a streak of light, and before the drunkards were passing the place, the girls were well back among marble gravestones.

Some artistic instinct warned them that two such queer monuments ought to be widely apart to escape notice.  So, in the gathering dimness, each knelt stock still, without even the comfort of the other’s proximity to help her through the long, long, awful minutes while the roisterous company were passing by.  The men proceeded slowly; happily they had no interest in inspecting the gravestones of the little cemetery; but had they been gazing over the fence with eager eyes, and had their designs been nothing short of murderous upon any monument they chanced to find alive, the hearts of the two erring maidens could not have beat with more intense alarm.  Fear wrought in them that sort of repentance which fear is capable of working.  “Oh, we’re very, very naughty; we ought to have gone to the picnic when Sophia was so good as to buy us new frocks,” they whispered in their hearts; and the moon looked down upon them benevolently.