A second flock, larger than the first, was bearing down upon them. Just in time to escape detection, Gordon sank into the box. Again the birds swung, again Gordon rose, and again two ducks fell dead to the quick right and left of the little sixteen-gage.
Twenty minutes passed. Fainter and fainter grew the light, until the sun sank low behind the pines, and the laughing blue and white waves turned sullen and gray. Together they left the blind, and, walking along the beach, Gordon began to gather up his spoils. Poor little wild ducks, there they lay, rising and falling as the tiny waves splashed gently against the shore, as if vainly seeking to rouse them once more to flight. No, they would never fly again; quietly enough they lay there, their bright, glossy feathers stained with a faint crimson, their wild, bright eyes closed in death.
With a swift revulsion of feeling the girl knelt over a mallard duck and drake, the little brown mate by some trick of fate, with her dusky head lying across the neck of her bright-plumed lord. "Oh, the poor darlings!" she cried pitifully. "Oh, Dick, we can't wish them alive again."
Gordon stood silent. The faint afterglow still hung in the fading west, but elsewhere all was dark. A star or two shone far up in the blue. The wind, erstwhile such a jolly companion, seemed graver now, as it moaned through the swaying tops of the dark pines. Suddenly the world became a solemn place, sad, unfriendly, vast. Gordon's face set hard as he looked at the kneeling girl and the two little dead wild ducks. "No," he said, with a world of meaning in his tone; "no, we can't wish them alive again," and together they turned toward home.
CHAPTER VI
[COUNTRY COUSINS]
The breakfast room, flooded with October sunshine, was such a pleasant place that Palmer, leisurely glancing through the columns of the morning paper, deliberately lingered as long as possible over his toast and eggs. Finally he laid the paper aside, slowly poured out a second cup of coffee, and with an expression of good-humored resignation glanced across the table at his secretary.
"Well, Morton," he said pleasantly, "let's have it. What have you got to bother me with to-day?"
The secretary smiled deferentially, as it behooves one to smile when one is earnestly desirous of keeping an easy, gentlemanly position, with little work and good pay.
"There's really very little this morning, Mr. Palmer," he answered. "There were the usual number of begging letters, which I answered in the usual form; a notice of the annual meeting of the polo club; one or two dinner invitations; a letter from Mr. Gordon asking you out to his shooting-box, and the check from the racing club for first money in the Essex."