Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/91

Rh wholly unaware how far from the thoughts of her landlord and his sons was any comprehension of the idea of obedience as she understood it.

When John Bassett returned to his post of observation by the young hickory-tree, he found the seat on which his attention had been so long concentrated occupied by two elderly women from Deerway,—his own next door neighbors. With a smothered ejaculation of contempt at his own folly, he made a hasty retreat, not however before both the women had seen him, and had beckoned to him with eager gestures to come and sit by their side. He shook his head and walked rapidly away in the opposite direction, as if he were about to leave the grounds; each moment, however, his keen eyes were roving to the right and to the left in search of a scarlet feather. Scarlet feathers there were in plenty, and knots of scarlet ribbon, as he found to his cost, after he had been for half an hour lured vainly about, first in one direction then in another, by them. His scarlet feather was nowhere to be found. To look for one person, among three thousand people roaming about in a grove of several acres, is like searching for a needle in a hay-stack; and so John said to himself at last, and vowed he would look no longer. He had been asking all the time for "Hi Peet," and had several times narrowly escaped finding him. The truth was he did not now so much want to find "Hi Peet," but he liked to give himself the