'Ah ha, mistress Dorothy, you do not escape me so!' he cried,
spreading out his arms as if to turn back some runaway creature.

But mistress Dorothy was startled, and mistress Dorothy did not
choose to be startled, and therefore mistress Dorothy was dignified,
if not angry.

'I do not like such behaviour, Richard,' she said. 'It ill suits
with the time. Why did you hide behind the hedge, and then leap
forth so rudely?'

'I thought you saw me,' answered the youth. 'Pardon my heedlessness,
Dorothy. I hope I have not startled you too much.'

As he spoke he stooped over the hand he had caught, and would have
carried it to his lips, but the girl, half-pettishly, snatched it
away, and, with a strange mixture of dignity, sadness, and annoyance
in her tone, said--

'There has been something too much of this, Richard, and I begin to
be ashamed of it.'

'Ashamed!' echoed the youth. 'Of what? There is nothing but me to be
ashamed of, and what can I have done since yesterday?'

'No, Richard; I am not ashamed of you, but I am ashamed of--of--this
way of meeting--and--and----'

'Surely that is strange, when we can no more remember the day in
which we have not met than that in which we met first! No, dear