"Why not?" he asked.
"Oh, the conventions, I suppose. We can't run fast enough or far enough to get away from them. I am wondering what the senior faculty would say if it could see me just now."
Prime grinned appreciatively. "It would probably shriek and expire."
"Happily it can't see; and to-morrow—surely Mr. Grider will come back for us to-morrow, won't he?"
"We are going to sleep soundly in that comforting belief, anyway. Which reminds me: you will have to have some sort of a place to sleep in. Why didn't I think of that before dark?"
Immediately after supper, and before he would permit himself to roll a cigarette from the diminishing supply of precious tobacco, Prime fell upon his problem, immensely willing but prodigiously inexperienced. At first he thought he would build a shack, but the lack of an axe put that out of the question. Round by round, ambition descended the ladder of necessity, and the result was nothing better than a camper's bed of broken pine twigs sheltered and housed in by a sort of bower built from such tree branches as he could break off by main strength.
The young woman did not withhold her meed of praise, especially after she had seen his blistered hands, which were also well daubed with pitch from the pines.
"It's a shame!" she said. "I ought not to have let you work so hard. If it should happen to rain, you'd need the shelter much more than I should."
"Why do you say that?"
"You don't look so very fit," was the calm reply; "and I am fit. Do you know, my one ambition, as a little girl, was to grow up and be an acrobat in a circus?"