Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/40

 rustled in the driveway maples and a sunlight that lay dazzlingly white on the gravel walks; and Don looked about him with an easing sense of freedom, drawing a refreshingly deep breath. He had not yet learned to be sentimental about nature; he had merely an animal pleasure in the escape to the open, where his eyes could stretch their book-cramped muscles in long sight, and he could walk free from the critical observation of his elders and talk shamelessly to himself.

He was heading for the wilder upper portion of the Park—where there were no flower-beds, and the ground had not been levelled, and the grass was uncut—when he saw the distant figure of a boy coming after him across the lower lawns; and he immediately dodged behind a bed of lilac bushes bordered with geraniums and striped ribbon grass. It was a large bed, in the shape of a great crescent; and Don skirted it, under cover—crouching in the accepted manner of an Indian scout—and peeped around the far tip of the crescent to see his cousin Conroy coming up on his trail. He knew it was against the law to enter one of these hoed beds of bushes; but, seeing no other escape, he ran back and leaped over the geraniums and crawled in among the lilacs on his hands and knees.

He lay down in a little open patch of ground in the centre of the bed and listened breathlessly for the footsteps of his pursuer. After a long time, he heard Conroy calling him at a distance up the Park, He rose cautiously to his knees, took off his little Scotch