Chapter X

"You observe," said Wade the next morning, "I come through the gate in the hedge."

The intermittent showers of yesterday afternoon and night had cleaned the June world, and the four ancient cedars from which the Walton place had received its name, and in the broken shade of which Eve was reading, exhaled a spicy odor under the influence of moisture and warmth. Eve, a slim white figure against the dark-green of the foliage, the sun flecking her waving hair, looked up, smiled and laid her book down.

"Good morning," she said. "Have you come to help me be lazy?"

"If you need help," he replied. "I brought these. They're not much, but I think they're the last in the village." He handed her a half-dozen sprays of purple lilac, small and in some places already touched with brown.

"Oh," she said, "they're lovely!" She buried her face in them and crooned over them delightedly. Witnessing her pleasure, Wade had no regrets for his hour's search over the length and breadth of Eden Village. She laid them in her lap and looked up curiously. "Where did you get them? Not from your hedge?"

"Oh, I just stopped at the florist's as I came along," he laughed. "He apologized for them and wanted me to take orchids, but I told him they were for the Lilac Girl."

"Is that me?" smiled Eve. "Thank you very much." She made a little bow. "I feel dreadfully impolite and inhospitable, Mr. Herrick, at not asking you to sit down, but--you see!" She waved a hand before her. "There's nothing but the ground, and that's damp, I'm afraid. So let us go indoors. Besides, I must put these in water."

"Please don't," he begged. "The ground isn't damp where the sun shines, and I wouldn't mind if it were. If I'm not keeping you from your book I'll sit down here. May I?"

"You'll catch rheumatism or ague or something else dreadful," she warned.

"Not I," he laughed. "I've never been sick a day in my life, unless it was after I'd got mixed up with dynamite that time. Don't you think you might wear those lilacs?"

"Surely not all of them. One, perhaps." She tucked a spray in at the bosom of her white waist. "You haven't told me yet where you got them. Have you been stealing?"

"Some I stole, some I begged, and some I--just took. I think I can truthfully declare, though, that there is not another bit of lilac at this moment in the whole village. I went on a foraging expedition after breakfast and there is the result. I've examined every bush and hedge with a microscope."

"And all that trouble for me!" she exclaimed. "I'm sure I'm flattered." A little flush of rose-pink crept into her clear cheeks. "Do you know, Mr.