“So far as I’ve been able to discover,” the girl continued, “this is the only group of trees the length and breadth of the park that answers description. But evidently they are not the ones of grandfather’s rhyme.” Pape drew some few breaths calculated to steady his pulse to normal. “Being only one of the laboring class and uneducated as most over the ultimate object of my labors—in other words, never having glimpsed the word-map of that crypt, I can’t be of much mental assistance.” “Oh, I shouldn’t mind telling you the lines if I only could remember them,” Jane conceded. “One distinctly says to dig near the ‘whisper of poplars four.’ Confound grandfathers and their mysterious ways! Despite your willingness and energy, Mr. Pape——” “Peter, if you please, Jane.” “Peter, we shall have to give it up. If you’ll smooth back the earth you’ve disturbed, I’ll take off my two score years and ten.” “You mean to retire my little old lady of the park?” “Must, I’m due to return to Aunt Helene’s to-night from my—my visit. I have on my gray suit under this loose old black thing and a hat in my bag. If you’ll escort me to the house, I’ll be that much more obliged.” Tugging at the strings of the poke bonnet, she stepped toward the cover of a nearby black haw whose flat-topped, branch-end clusters of bloom gleamed like phosphorus over a dark sea. He turned back to his task with his consistent superiority to intelligent inquiry. Muscularly, at least, he had earned her confidence. So far free from interruption more staying than a chance glance or careless comment, they seemed about to end an evening successful in its unsuccess, when there sounded a verbal assault. “You’re under arrest—the both of yous—and caught with the goods, at that!” To Pape’s ears the Irish accent had a familiar sound. Straightening to confront the two uniformed figures now materializing from the dusk and the hillock’s crest, he executed a signal which he hoped would be understood by his companion as a suggestion that she “slide out”—leave him to wriggle from the clutch of the law as best he might. “Arrest? And for what, if you have time to swap me word for word?” he put demand. “For the messing up and maltreating of Central Park in violation of enough statutes to hang and then jail you for a year. Don’t bother denying or it’ll be used again you. We been watching a whole half hour. You haven’t a chance at a get-away, so come along nice and companionable.” The last admonition was shared with the bent old lady, who was too dim-sighted, evidently, to have seen her laborer’s telepogram and now appeared from around the misnamed white-blooming black haw. “We wouldn’t like to be rough with a lady.”