“Do you think we are lost, Gill?” she inquired cheerfully.
Her companion shook her head.
“Well, as David Murray says, we are where we shouldn’t be and don’t know where we are, but I should never call that being lost, would you, Bettina?”
Grasping a small birch tree firmly so as not to be obliged to continue her descent, and forcing Bettina to imitate her example, Gill turned halfway around.
“To get down this hill and find our camp before dusk I suggest that we follow the fashion set by ‘The Waters at Lodore’. I am not sufficiently literary to recall the exact lines of the poem, I leave that to you, Princess, but there was something about their dashing, splashing and tumbling, something quick and active, and in contrast to our methods for this past hour. Farewell, valor at present is the better part of discretion, to transpose the axiom.”
As she ceased speaking, releasing the slender young tree and bracing her feet together, Mary Gilchrist began to slide down the steep incline.
In the heart of the Adirondack forest it was now early in the month of November and about four o’clock in the afternoon. Overhead the sun was still shining and the sky a warm blue, yet from the ground arose a light mist, playing in and out amid the underbrush and the bases of the trees, ethereal and evanescent, the floating draperies of unseen fairies holding an autumn carnival.
Bettina Graham continued her downward progress more slowly and cautiously.
Over the trail beech leaves and birch leaves and the long fingers of the pine had blown in little drifts of amber and green which, mixing with the decaying wood and wet earth, formed a slippery aisle.
Ten minutes elapsed before Bettina rejoined her companion. She then discovered Mary Gilchrist seated upon an overturned log, her gun and game on the ground beside her, her hat in her lap, while she shook bits of brushwood, twigs and leaves from her hair and removed them from her apparel.