They both brightened up, and when we reached the hotel the landlady provided a soothing lotion for the bites and stings.
By the time we had started for the lake, 74 the afflicted two were in holiday spirit again.
I sought cover in a small shed called a bath-house and got into my swimming outfit and shot out from the dipping end of the diving-board into the water. When I came to the surface, Silvia, sitting beside Diogenes on the dock, shrieked wildly.
“Oh, Lucien, there are snakes all around you! Come out, quick!”
“They are only water snakes,” I assured her.
“I don’t care what kind they are. They are snakes just the same.”
Diogenes instantly began to bellow for me to hand him a snake to play with.
“He recognizes his own,” I told Silvia, who, however, saw nothing amusing in my implication.
When I came out of the water, the temperature had climbed several degrees and 75 we were glad to seek the hotel parlor, which was cool and damp.
After dinner Silvia put Diogenes to bed and we sat out on the veranda. I was enjoying my evening smoke and the feel of the night wind in my face. Silvia had just finished telling me that merely to be away from the Polydores was Paradise enough for her, and that she didn’t care very much about the woods, anyway––the lake was sufficient, when her optimism was rudely jolted by the shrill, shudder-sending song of the festive mosquito.