She was not only crying, but she was showing symptoms of incipient hysteria. "An old-fashioned girl," thought Herring, "like Great-grandmother Saltonstall." He raised himself to a sitting position just in time to slide an arm around her waist as, the hysteria now well under way, she sat down beside him and began to wave her hands up and down like a polite baby saying good-by to some one.
"One new thing under the sun after another," thought Herring. "Never had arm round hysterical girl's waist before. Got it there now. When you need her, she takes a good brace and pulls for all she's worth. When she needs you, she seats herself on six inches of water and yells. Just like Great-grandmother Saltonstall." Aloud he kept saying: "That's right! Greatest relief in the world! Go to it!" And his arm tightened about her with extraordinary tenderness.
Her hysterics ended as suddenly as they had begun. And then she wasted a valuable half-hour apologizing for having had them; Herring protesting all the while that he had enjoyed them just as much as she had, and that they had done him a world of good. And then they had to stop talking because their teeth began to chatter so hard that they simply couldn't keep on. Herring stuttered something about, "Exercise is what a body needs," and they rose to their feet and fought their way through a dense grove of arbor-vitæ.
"The stealthy Indian goes through such places without making a sound," said Herring.
"Or getting his moccasins wet," said Phyllis. "Oh!" And she sank to the waist.
"Never mind," said Herring, "it will be dark before long. And when we have no choice of where to step, maybe we'll have better luck."
"It will have to be dark very soon," said Phyllis, "if we have any more of our clothes taken away from us by the brambles."
"That's a new idea!" exclaimed Herring. "Young couple starve to death in the woods because modesty forbids them to join their friends in the open. The head-line might be: 'Stripped by Brambles,' or 'The Two Bares.'"
He was so pleased with his joke that he had to lean against a tree. The laughing set him to coughing, and Phyllis beat him methodically between the shoulders.
Herring still refused to be serious. In helping Phyllis over the bad places, he performed prodigies of misapplied strength and made prodigious puns. And he said that never in his life had he been in such a delightful scrape.