“I like to hear the leaves rustle when you kick them, don’t you?  When I was so high, I used to pretend it was wading in the surf.”

The young man moved over to the gutter of the road where the leaves were deepest and kicked violently.  “And the more noise you make,” he said, “the more you frighten away the wild animals.”

The girl shuddered in a most helpless and fascinating fashion.

“Don’t!” she whispered.  “I didn’t mention it, but already I have seen several lions crouching behind the trees.”

“Indeed?” said the young man.  His tone was preoccupied.  He had just kicked a rock, hidden by the leaves, and was standing on one leg.

“Do you mean you don’t believe me?” asked the girl, “or is it that you are merely brave?”

“Merely brave!” exclaimed the young man.  “Massachusetts is so far north for lions,” he continued, “that I fancy what you saw was a grizzly bear.  But I have my trusty electric torch with me, and if there is anything a bear cannot abide, it is to be pointed at by an electric torch.”

“Let us pretend,” cried the girl, “that we are the babes in the wood, and that we are lost.”

“We don’t have to pretend we’re lost,” said the man, “and as I remember it, the babes came to a sad end.  Didn’t they die, and didn’t the birds bury them with leaves?”

“Sam and Mr. Peabody can be the birds,” suggested the girl.

“Sam and Peabody hopping around with leaves in their teeth would look silly,” objected the man, “I doubt if I could keep from laughing.”

“Then,” said the girl, “they can be the wicked robbers who came to kill the babes.”

“Very well,” said the man with suspicious alacrity, “let us be babes.  If I have to die,” he went on heartily, “I would rather die with you than live with any one else.”

When he had spoken, although they were entirely alone in the world and quite near to each other, it was as though the girl could not hear him, even as though he had not spoken at all.  After a silence, the girl said:  “Perhaps it would be better for us to go back to the car.”

“I won’t do it again,” begged the man.

“We will pretend,” cried the girl, “that the car is a van and that we are gypsies, and we’ll build a campfire, and I will tell your fortune.”

“You are the only woman who can,” muttered the young man.

The girl still stood in her tracks.

“You said—­” she began.

“I know,” interrupted the man, “but you won’t let me talk seriously, so I joke.  But some day——­”

“Oh, look!” cried the girl.  “There’s Fred.”

She ran from him down the road.  The young man followed her slowly, his fists deep in the pockets of the great-coat, and kicking at the unoffending leaves.

The chauffeur was peering through a double iron gate hung between square brick posts.  The lower hinge of one gate was broken, and that gate lurched forward leaving an opening.  By the light of the electric torch they could see the beginning of a driveway, rough and weed-grown, lined with trees of great age and bulk, and an unkempt lawn, strewn with bushes, and beyond, in an open place bare of trees and illuminated faintly by the stars, the shadow of a house, black, silent, and forbidding.