But soon, seeing that she took not the slightest notice of him, that her eyes, to all seeming, looked through him at the trees on the further side of the dell, he lost his gracious air, and began to halt and stumble in his speech.

Then he lost his head and plunged into a detailed account of the passion with which Dorothy's beauty had inflamed his heart, wearing the while his finest air of a conqueror dictating terms.
Dorothy surveyed him with a contemptuous wonder, over which her sense of the ludicrous was slowly gaining the mastery; Elsie stared at him.
At last he ended the impassioned description of his emotions with a yet more impassioned appeal to Dorothy to fly with him to a far-off shore forever shining with the golden light of love; and Dorothy laughed a gentle laugh of pure amusement.
Count Sigismond flushed purpler; his eyes stood well out of his head; he drew himself up with a superb air--a little spoiled by a wince as his left boot deftly reminded him that he was wearing it, and cried, "Ha! You laugh! You laugh at Sigismond de Puy-de-Dome! Mon Dieu! You shall learn!" And with a sudden spring he grabbed at her.
She jerked aside, sprang up, and away from him.

But he was between her and the exit from the dell; he crouched with the impressive deliberation of a villain in a melodrama for another spring, and Elsie screamed, "Tinker! Tinker!" Count Sigismond heard a rustling in the bushes above, and looked up to see them parted by an angel child, in white ducks, bearing a bunch of lilies in his hand, who gazed at him with a serious, almost pained face, and leapt lightly down.
With a "Pah! Imbecile!" addressed to himself for delaying, the Count sprang towards Dorothy, was conscious of a swift white streak, and the head of the angel child, impelled by wiry muscles and a weight of seventy-six pounds, smote as a battering ram upon the first and second buttons of his waistcoat.

He doubled up and sat down hard in one movement; then turned on his side, and gasped and gasped.
[Illustration: As a battering ram upon the first and second buttons of his waistcoat.] "Come along!" cried Tinker in a most imperative tone.

"A row is a horrid nuisance when there are women in it!" And he caught his charges, either by an arm, and bustled them out of the dell and down the road.
Dorothy laughed as she ran; never before had she seen vaunting arrogance brought low in so sudden and signal a fashion.