They had fallen into the habit of taking the Baby by the throat and asking him in trenchant tones, 'Have you spoken to her ?' The Baby found it convenient to be able to give a truthful negative, not that he would have minded fibbing in the least, but in this case the fib would certainly have been detected; he could not expect his goddess to enter into any clandestine parley and keep his secret.
Had the Baby taken the matter less to heart he would have been more rash in asserting his independence, but he meditated some great step and 'lay low.' What or when the irrevocable move was to be he had no definite idea, the thought of it was only as yet an exalted swelling of mind and heart.
There was a period, after the affair of the boat, when he spent a good deal of time haunting the sacred precincts of the house where Helen lived.

The precincts consisted of a dusty lane, a flat, ugly fenced field where a cow and a horse grazed, and a place immediately about the house covered with thick grass and shaded by maple trees.

There were some shrubs too, behind which one could hide if necessary, but they were prickly, uncomfortable to nestle against, and the unmown grass absorbed an immense quantity of dew.

In imagination, however, the Baby wandered on pastoral slopes and in classic shades.

At first he paid his visits at night when the family were asleep, and he slipped about so quietly that no one but the horse and the cow need know where he went or what he did.
At length, however, he grew more bold, and took his way across the maple grove going and coming from other evening errands.