Page:Across the Stream.djvu/130

120 the lit passage within. Archie got up swiftly and suddenly, with a bubble of laughter.

"Oh, let's be like the garden scene in Faust," he whispered. "Don't you know, when the two couples wander about? Ah, they've seen us: they don't do that in well-conducted opera."

This was true enough,. for immediately Helena's name was called by her sister. She gave a little sigh.

"Yes, darling," she said.

"Cousin Marion thinks it's time you went to bed," said Jessie. "And is Archie there too? She wants to see him."

Archie and Helena exchanged a quick glance in the darkness. They knew it, rather than saw it: Helena, at any rate, was quite certain of it.

"I must go in then," he said. "Your fault for making me shout."

Helena recollected a révue that she and Archie had seen together.

"The woman pays," she said in a histrionic falsetto, and without further word ran into the house, feeling very well satisfied with herself. She was sure that she had made herself a little enigmatical to him, had roused his curiosity. Decidedly he wanted to know more....

Archie always slept in a hammock slung between the stone-pine and the acacia in the garden, for though that year which he had spent at Grives, with which our history of his childhood closed, seemed to have eradicated the deadly seeds, he was still recommended to pass as much of his time as possible out of doors. The fourteen years that had elapsed since then had given him six feet of robust height, and there seemed now but little danger of the hereditary foe again beleaguering him. He had spent five years at Eton, and now had just finished his course at Cambridge, where he had contrived to combine classics and rowing