March had propelled her into the open track and stopped as she said this to lean forward and peer into the saucy face. A disagreeable—an absurd—thrill passed over him. Had he lost Hetty? “An event! Accomplished or prospective?” “Both!” chuckled Hester. “Is it an engagement?” bringing out the word courageously. The question was never answered. A vigorous onward push had brought them into the moonlit area surrounding the king apple tree. Thor rushed forward, bellowing ferociously at a long black body that lay half under, half beyond the dipping outward branches, now weighted almost to the ground with growing fruit. “Homer!” shouted March to the figure retreating toward the garden. “Come back! hurry!” And, hastily, to Hester: “I will send you home with him and go for the police. Don’t be frightened. It is only a drunken tramp, or may be a sleeper. In either case he cannot stay here. These are my father’s grounds.” Hester had not uttered a sound, but the slight figure, bent toward the recumbent man, had a strained intensity of expression words could not have conveyed. Her eyes were fixed, as by the fascination of horrified dread—one small hand plucked oddly at her throat. “Take her home, Homer!” March ordered, “and say nothing to alarm the ladies. I’ll attend to _him_!” “No! _no!_ NO!” shrilled Hester in an unearthly tone that made him start. “You must go home! you! _you!_ and say nothing! tell nobody! O God of mercy, it has come at last! Don’t touch him!” her voice rising into a husky shriek. For, parting the boughs, March passed to the head of the prostrate man, and stooped to raise him. His quick eye had perceived that he was well dressed and no common tramp in figure, also that he had lain, not fallen, where he was found. In bending to take hold of him, he detected, even in the intensity of his excitement, the peculiar, heavy, close odor of drugs that had hung in the air on the Fourth of July night. In company with a policeman, our young artist had once visited a Chinese “opium dive” in New York, and he recognized the smell now. Homer was beside him, and lent intelligent aid. “_Now_,” he drawled, without the slightest evidence of alarm, “_I_ mos’ly lif’s him up _so_-fashion!” The action brought the features into a rift of moonlight. “Great Heavens!” broke from March in a low tone of horror and dismay. “It is Mr. Wayt!” Laying him on the turf he went back to Hester and seized the bar of her chair. “You must go home! You must not see him, my poor child! It is your father, and he is very ill—unconscious. Not a moment is to be lost. I must go for a doctor immediately!” “_Let go!_” Beside herself with fury, she actually struck at the hand grasping the propeller; her eyes flashed fire; her accents, hardly louder than a wheezing whisper, were jerky gasps, painful to hear. “Let go, I say! and do you go to your safe, decent home, as I told you! Tony and I are used to this sort of thing!”