"Ah, that's your father in you," said Mr. Moore, unconsciously betraying something that was almost disapproval; "your father was a northern man. But your mother, Lucian, was a thorough southerner; she had no taste for invention."
"She wouldn't have had it even if she had been a northern woman, I fancy," responded Spenser; "women are not inventors. I don't mind saying it before Mrs. Harold and Miss Thorne, because they haven't the air of wishing to be; it's a particular sort of air, you know."
"Is your invention strong?" asked Winthrop. "I don't know how we are going to get the ladies down to the beach, unless we make a perch for them by driving that stick of yours and Mr. Moore's butterfly pole into the sand-drift half-way down. From there, with our help, they might perhaps jump the rest of the distance; we should have to tread out some sort of footing for ourselves."
Mr. Moore involuntarily glanced at his green pole, and then at Margaret and Garda, as if estimating their weight.
"We shall certainly snap it in two," exclaimed Garda, gayly. "Snip, snap, gone!"
"But there's a descent not so very far above here," said Spenser; "I've found it once, and I think, if you will trust me, I can find it again." He led the way into the chaparral, and the others followed.
The chaparral, a thicket of little evergreen oaks, rose, round the flower cove, to a height of ten feet. But soon it grew lower, and they came out upon a broad stretch of it not much over four or four and a half feet in height, very even on the top, extending unbroken to the south as far as they could see, and rising gently on the west, in the same even sweep, over the small ridge that formed Patricio's backbone; their heads were now well above the surface of this leafy sea.
"There's my track," said Spenser.
It was a line which had been made across the foliage by his passage through it; the leaves had been rippled back a little, so that there was a trail visible on the green surface like that left by a boat which has passed over a smooth pond; they made their way towards this trail.
The little oaks were not thorny, but their small stubborn branches grew as closely at the bottom as at the top, so that it was necessary to push with the ankles as well as with the shoulders in order to get through.