"Let's try it again, Miss Marks," cried Leland enthusiastically. "How is this pose?" He dropped gracefully to one knee, baring his head as he bowed it over Lloyd's hands.
"Is the change in him or is it in me?" thought Lloyd as the dark eager face smiled up at her, with its quick flashing smile that she found so peculiarly attractive. "He certainly is the most entahtaining man I evah talked to."
"The show is over," called Gay as Miss Marks began to put up her camera. "If your royal highnesses will deign to descend, dinner will be served immediately." It was an attractive table she led them to, the red berries shining in luscious heaps in their little green baskets, mounds of fresh watercress beside every plate, and a big bouquet of wildflowers in the centre of the rock table.
"What is the peculiar charm of a picnic?" queried Alex as he fished an ant out of the sugar and opened a half-cooked potato.
"At home one would send such a dish back to the kitchen in red-hot wrath. Here one eats it in a sort of solemn joy."
"It's the spell of the June woods," suggested Miss Marks.
"No, it's youth in the blood," said Leland. "All the Junes in the world and all outdoors wouldn't make a half-baked potato fit for the gods unless one has 'the sun and the wind in his pulses.'"
"No," insisted Gay. "It can't be that, for Jameson isn't much older than you, and he despises prowling around in the woods, as he calls it. He made so much fun of it that Lucy went driving with him instead of coming with us, and she adores such outings, just as much now as she did before she was married."
"Maybe no one feels the charm unless the gods have given him a sort of Midas touch that will turn everything disagreeable, like ants and underdone potatoes, into golden experiences," said Alex. "The Midas imagination let us call it. And the way to keep it in good working order is to give it constant practice. Let's have a picnic every day."
"To-morrow," announced Leland, "I'll take you all over to that old English garden that I discovered, to take that Garden fancy of Browning's we were discussing."