only two women domestics, with her in her home--to say that her
mistress had heard some one evidently attempting to open a window on
the piazza, and that they were all in fear of their lives, and that she
had fled out of the back way to ask Mr. Harlson the elder, or his son,
to come over at once and look around.

The father laughed, and said that, had there been a burglar, he must
have fled already, and the young man, laughing too, said that some one
must go anyhow, in all courtesy to defenseless women, and that if Mrs.
Rolfston feared for her front porch, he would lie upon a blanket in the
lawn beside it to set her mind at rest. He had not slept beneath the
stars alone, he said, since the family had left the farm. And there
was much laughing, and Harlson took home the servant girl, and she,
growing bold as they approached the house, ran up the path ahead of
him. The lawn between the better house and street in the lake country
town is often a little forest, so dense the trees and their foliage.
And added to the fragrance of the leaves in later midsummer are the
mingled odors of petunias and pinks and rosemary and bergamot and musk,
for all these flourish late. And the moon comes through the tree-tops
in splashes, and there is a softness and a shade, and it is all like a
scented garden in some old Arabian story, and the senses are affected
and, maybe, the reason. Harlson went up the path, half dreaming, yet
alive in every vein. There was no burglar visible, but a wonderful
woman, in fleecy dishabille, was sure she had heard a sound most
sinister, and endangered women must be guarded of the strong.

And Grant Harlson returned not home that night; yet the moon, shining
through the trees, revealed no form upon a blanket in the garden.

And the summer days drifted by; and the young man fresh from college,