“I’d better not,” Alex answered. “I want to see Max, if I can, before he gets wind of this.”
“Go, then; perhaps you’d better. I am glad you came to me as you did, for if I had heard that Max was there, and nothing more, I might have been unwisely severe.”
As Harry had suggested, Alex found the two boys in the ravine. After the heat of the May afternoon and his rapid walk, the coolness around them was a great relief, and Alex was glad to drop down on the coarse, uneven turf by their side, and rest for a few moments, before beginning upon the subject which was weighing so heavily on his mind. The ravine, as the boys called it, was a deep gorge in the hills, worn away by the swift mountain brook that hurried through it, to seek the calmer waters of the Connecticut and go with them to the sea. The brook was so narrow and the slant of its sides so abrupt that the branches of the trees on either side mingled overhead to form one common shade; while below them the water now plunged over a little precipice, now raced along the shallows, breaking into a lacelike foam over its rocky bed, now flowed smoothly and silently through the still pools, so dark and deep, where trout love to hide under the shelter of the over-hanging ferns, then rushed away, to go on racing and plunging and eddying, over and over again, till it joined the quieter current of the mighty river, three miles and more away.
“Max,” Alex began abruptly, after the interval of silence which had followed their greetings; “you went to that spread last night, didn’t you?”
Instantly Max was on the defensive.
“Yes, I did,” he replied curtly, as he threw a stick into the whirlpool below him, and watched it circle round and round in the swirling eddy. “What then?”
“I hear you had rather a lively time,” said Alex, trying to approach the subject so gently that Max should not be roused to anger.
“Well, as I said, what then?” said Max defiantly, as he tried in vain to meet the kind blue eyes so steadily fixed upon his own. “I don’t know as it’s any of your business, if we did.”
Leon looked up in surprise, for in his ignorance of the matter, he was at a loss to account for Max’s unwonted irritability.
“Perhaps it is my business,” Alex replied, and he went on to tell of his talk with the doctor.