When he had disposed of the egg nogg he set the empty glass on the tray on the grass where Sylvia had deposited it. Then he turned to look at his companion. Sylvia was well worth looking at these days. Her old rose bloom and "moonshininess" were back again. She had returned close to the "jubilant springs" from which she had journeyed afar during the troublous winter past, though perhaps the little girl Sylvia had disappeared forever in the course of her devious wayfaring. At any rate, the new womanliness was very becoming.
"Is this a good time to propose?" demanded Phil so suddenly that Sylvia blushed like a schoolgirl and drooped her head, but her lips twitched roguishly as she averred that it was as good a time as any.
"Very well. Remember I'm scared to death. I never proposed to a girl before in my life and I'm never going to do it again. One, two, three! Sylvia, will you marry me?"
Sylvia lifted her head then and her eyes met Phil's straight and brave with the fine surrender of a proud woman.
"Thank the Lord!" Phil mopped his perspiring brow. "If you don't mind kissing me again I'd feel a little more as if it were real. I've lived a dreadfully long time on that heavenly kiss. I'd like an earth one, please."
An hour later they were still in the hammock as blissful and mutually self-absorbed as the redbirds.
"Sylvia, do you realize that I haven't any money, thanks to this heavenly-infernal smash up of mine, that even my job is knocked galley westward by all this business? If I weren't too jolly happy to think at all I should think I was an idiot and an ass if nothing worse to ask a girl to marry me under the circumstances."
"Don't think," said Sylvia. "What is the use? You will get caught up quick enough when you are well again. Don't talk about money. It leaves a bad taste in your mouth."
"All right, I won't. But, Sylvia, there is another thing." Phil's eyes strayed over the beautiful May sweet garden, on to the great red brick house whose open doors suggested hospitality and affluence and home happiness on a bountiful scale. "Have you thought you will have to give this up and come and live in a little airtight compartment in New York?"
For a moment Sylvia was startled out of her new content. Her eyes, too, followed Phil's. Never had Arden Hall seemed so dear, so infinitely desirable as now in the ripe hour of her happiness. Somehow she had never thought of that particular complication though it was obvious enough. To lose the Hall now that she had just come into the very heart of it, or to have it again for brief holidays only, snatched "on the wing" as she had said once before! A redbird flashed like a flame before her in the sunshine. The redbirds would soon be nesting. Mechanically the thought crossed her mind. Nesting! That was it. She, too, would be nesting in the heart of the man she loved. She looked back to Phil who was watching her with troubled eyes.