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These she sweetened with lime, mixed in her small pan, and applied judiciously to the peach-tree by the grape-arbour, to the thickets of pearl-gray iris, to the beloved roses, prairie climber, Baltimore bell, and General Jacqueminot.
He was astounded to see lights burning and the house open how weird for them to have supper at such an hour! He concealed his box in the grape-arbour and slunk through the kitchen into the dining-room. Probably they had gotten up in the middle of the night, out of tardy alarm for him. It served them right. Yet they seemed hardly to notice him when he slid awkwardly into his chair.
And they passed under a shadowed grape-arbour and past a dead locust-tree, which a vine had made into a green tower of waving tendrils, and from which came the fragrant breath of wild grape, and back again to the gate, where Judith reached down for an old-fashioned pink and pinned it in his button-hole, talking with low, friendly affection meanwhile, and turning backward the leaves of the past rapidly.
He was under the clean, sharp stars of a moonless night. His keen senses tasted the pungent smoke and the softer feminine fragrance of the apple-blossoms. His nerves were stilled to pleasant ease, except when the laugh of the girl floated to him from the grape-arbour back of the house. That disturbed him to fierce longings the clear, high measure of a woman's laugh floating to him in the night.
Also, which was perhaps her chief charm, she could be made to believe that only he could protect her from the Gratcher, a monstrous thing, half beast, half human, which was often seen back of the house; sometimes flitting through the grape-arbour, sometimes coming out of the dark cellar, sometimes peering around corners.
He knew he would not be allowed to start on the Sabbath, even in a career that was to be all wickedness. In the grape-arbour he massed certain articles necessary for the expedition: a very small strip of carpet on which he meant to sleep; a copy of "Golden Days," with an article giving elaborate instructions for camping in the wilderness.
Not for worlds had she suspected he was hearing her, that unlucky morning in the grape-arbour, when she recited her latest Poem to Miss Princess. Now she smiled perfunctorily, and started to pass him. But Mr. Hackett, swinging his stick, stood with his feet wide apart and looked down at her. "How's the priestess of song, this fine morning?" he persisted. "All-right," stammered Missy.
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