"No," answered Phoebe, "but you must be tired so I'll just slip down,"
and she essayed to cheat him with the utmost treachery. David neither
spoke nor looked at her directly but took her quietly in his arms and
swung her to the ground beside him.

Now this was not the first pursuit of the possum that had been attended
by Phoebe in the company of David Kildare, and she was prepared for the
audacious hint of a squeeze, with which he usually took his toll and
which she always ignored utterly with reproving intent; the more
reproving on the one or two occasions when she had been tempted into
yielding to the caress for the remotest fraction of a second. But for
every snub in the fence events that had been pulled off between them in
the past years, David was fully revenged by the impassive landing of
Phoebe on the dry and frozen grass at his side. Revenged--and there was
something over that was cutting into her adamant heart like a two-edge
marble saw.

But Phoebe had been born a thoroughbred and it was head up and run as she
saw in a second, so she smiled up at him and said in a perfectly friendly
tone:

"I really don't think we'd better wait for Caroline and Andrew. Do let's
hurry, for they've treed, and I think those dogs will go mad in a
moment!" And together they disappeared in the woodland.

Around a tall tree that stood on the slope of the hill they found a scene
that was uproar rampant. Five maddened dogs gazed aloft into the gnarled
branches of the persimmon king and danced and jumped to the accompaniment
of one another's insane yelps. A half-dozen negro boys were in the same