The man found neither girl nor quail; the grassy seat beneath the tree was empty. But just as he was rejoining his partner--"Hark!" he said; "there he is again, farther up the river. Now if we listen like's not we'll hear another fellow answer him. Many's the time I've lain in the grass and called one of them right up. There! that was the answering challenge, away off yonder between here and that hill with the pines on it. There's going to be a beautiful little fight when those two birds meet, and that college girl's going to see it. I wish I--There's the other one again; they get closer each time! Didn't you hear it?" The wife replied, mainly to herself, that she did not; that if he had her backache he wouldn't hear a brass band, and that her next walk would be by herself. The partner did not venture to look back after that, but as they sauntered on, rarely speaking except when the mother rebuked the children, he listened eagerly, and after a silence of unaccountable length, finally heard the two calls once more, up near the rapids and very close to each other. He dared not prick his ears, but while he agreed with his wife that if they were ever going home at all it was time they were about it, he could not but think the outcome of a man's life depends largely on the sort of girl he gets. At the upper end of the meadow, meantime, Barbara Garnet, with "Herrick" in one hand and her hat pressed against the back of her skirts in the other, was bending and peering round the trunk of an elm draped to the ground in flounces of its own green. The last response to her whistle had seemed to come from a spot so close in front of her that she feared to risk another step, and yet, peep and pry as she might, she could neither spy out nor nearer decoy the cunning challenger. In a sense of delinquency she noted the sky showing yellow and red through the hill-top pines, and seeing she must make short end of her play, prepared to rush out upon the rogue and have an old-time laugh at his pretty panic. So!--one for the money, two for the show, three to make ready, and four for to--"Ha, ha, ha!"-- "Good gracious alive!" exclaimed the quail, leaping from his back to his feet, and standing a fathom tall before the gasping, half-sinking girl. "Good gra'--why--why, my good gracious, Miss Barb! why--why, my good gracious!" insisted John March. LXXIII. IMMEDIATELY AFTER CHAPEL There was a great deal of pleasure in the house of the three sisters that evening. The widow asked March to stay to tea, and when he opened his mouth to decline, the wrong word fell out and he accepted. He confided to Barbara his fear that in so doing he had blundered, but she softly scouted the idea, and with a delicious reproachfulness in her murmur, "wondered if he supposed they"--etc.