"I'm sure it has something with 'shine' and 'line,'" ventured the young lady from Utica, who was a school-mistress, "or 'earth' and 'birth.' I know I've heard it, but I can't remember."
"Humph!" sniffed Miss Carroway, and passed it on. Nobody else ventured a definition and the problem came back to its proposer. She sat up a bit straighter, and swept the circle with her firelit glasses.
"One's thrown to the air, and the other's heir to the throne," she declared, as if pronouncing judgment. "I don't think this is much of a conundrum crowd. My Charlie would have guessed that the first time. But I'll give you one more—something easier, and mebbe older."
When at last he was permitted to go Frank made his way gloomily to his room and to bed. The day's events had been depressing. He had lost ground with Constance, whom, of late, he had been trying so hard to please. He had been willing enough, he reflected, to go up the mountain, but it really had been cloudy up there and too late to start. Then Constance had blamed him for the unpleasant incident which had followed—it seemed to him rather unjustly. Now, Edith Morrison had declared openly what he himself had been almost ready, though rather vaguely, to suspect. He had let Constance slip through his fingers after all. He groaned aloud at the thought of Constance as the wife of another. Was it, after all, too late? If he should begin now to do and dare and conquer, could he regain the lost ground? And how should he begin? Half confused with approaching sleep, his thoughts intermingled with strange fancies, that one moment led him to the mountain top where in the mist he groped for mushrooms, while the next, as in a picture, he was achieving some splendid triumph and laying the laurels at her feet. Then he was wide awake again, listening to the whisper of the trees that came through his open window and the murmur of voices from below. Presently he found himself muttering, "What is the difference between a fountain and the Prince of Wales?"—a question which immediately became a part of his perplexing sleep-waking fancies, and the answer was something which, like a boat in the mist, drifted away, just out of reach. What was the difference between a fountain and the Prince of Wales? It seemed important that he should know, and then the query became visualized in a sunlit plume of leaping water with a diadem at the top, and this suddenly changed into a great mushroom, of the color of gold, and of which some one was saying, "Don't touch it—it's the Yellow Danger." Perhaps that was Edith Morrison, for he saw her dark, handsome face just then, her eyes bright with tears and fierce with the blaze of jealousy. Then he slept.
CHAPTER VII
THE PATH THAT LEADS BACK TO BOYHOOD
The sun was not yet above the hills when Frank Weatherby left the Lodge next morning. He halted for a moment to procure some convenient receptacle and was supplied with a trout basket which, slung across his shoulder, gave him quite the old feeling of preparation for a day's sport, instead of merely an early trip up McIntyre. Robin Farnham was already up and away with his party, but another guide loitered about the cabin and showed a disposition to be friendly.
"Better wait till after breakfast," he said. "It don't take long to run up McIntyre and back. You'll have plenty of time."
"But it looks clear up there, now. It may be foggy, later on. Besides, I've just bribed the cook to give me a bite, so I'm not afraid of getting hungry."