, as well as
all small accessories of the costliest, he might have been going to or
coming from a wedding.

He was imposing, therefore, to a short, stout, elderly woman with whom
he suddenly found himself face to face as the path took a sharp sweep
to the south. The shrubs which had kept them hidden from each other
gave place here to open stretches of lawn. When Allerton paused and
lifted his hat, the woman naturally paused, too.

She was a red-faced woman crowned with a bonnet of the style
introduced by Mrs. Langtry in 1878, but worn on this occasion some
degrees off center. On her arm she carried a flat basket of which the
contents, decently covered with a towel, might have been freshly
laundered shirts. Being stopped by a gentleman of Allerton's
impressiveness and plainly suffering expression, her face grew
motherly and sympathetic.

"Madam, I wish to ask if you'll marry me?"

Even a dull brain couldn't fail to catch words hammered out with this
force of precision. The woman didn't wait to have them repeated.
Dropping her basket as it was, she took to flight. Flight was the
word. A modern Atalanta of Wellesley or Bryn Mawr might have envied
the chamois leaps which took the good creature across the grass to the
protection of a man with a lawn-mower.

Allerton couldn't pause to watch her, for a new sibyl was advancing.
To his disgust rather than not, she was young and pretty, a nursemaid
pushing a baby-cart into which a young man of two was strapped. While
far more likely to take him than the stout old party still skipping
the greensward like a mountain roe, she would be much less plausible
as a reason for going to the evil one. But a vow was a vow, and he was
in for it.

His approach was the same as on the previous occasion. Lifting his hat
ceremoniously, he said with the same distinctness of utterance,
"Madam, I wish to ask if you'll marry me?"

The girl, who had paused when he did, leaned on the pusher of her
go-cart, studying him calmly. Chewing something with a slow, rotary
movement of the lips and chin, she broke the action with a snap before
quite completing the circle, to begin all over again. "Oh, you do, do
you?" was her quiet response.

"If you please."

She studied him again, with the same semi-circular motion of the jaw.
She might have been weighing his proposal.

"Say, is this one of them club initiation stunts, or have you just got
a noive?"

"Am I to take that as a yes or a no?"

"And