Edith felt an answering throb of ecstasy. "Oh, Maurice, I wish you and I were gypsies!" she said. She did not in the least resent his candor as to her presence during the week of camping; though just before they started her feelings really were a little hurt: it happened that in trying to help Eleanor pack, she was close enough to her to notice a thread on her hair; instantly, she put out a friendly and officious thumb and finger to remove it—at which Eleanor winced, and said, "Ouch!"
"I thought it was a white thread," Edith explained, abashed.
Eleanor said, sharply, "Please don't touch my hair!" which conveyed nothing to Edith except that the Bride—who instantly ran up to her room—"was mad." When she came back (the "thread" having disappeared) Edith was full of apologies.
"Awfully sorry I mussed your hair," she said.
She went up the mountain with them, walking on the hard grades, and trying to placate Eleanor by keeping a hand on Lion's bridle, so that she might feel sure he wouldn't run away. When at last, rather blown and perspiring, they reached the camp, Eleanor got out of the wagon and said she wanted to "help"; but Edith, still contrite about the "thread," said: "Not I'm not going to have you hurt your lovely hands!" In the late afternoon, having saved Eleanor's hands in every possible way, she left them, and thinking, without the slightest rancor, of the rough bliss she was not asked to share, went running down the mountain with Rover at her heels.
Eleanor, wondering at her willingness to take that long road home with only the lumbering old dog for company, was intensely glad to have her go.
"Girls of that age are so uninteresting," she told Maurice; "and now we'll be all by ourselves!"
"Yes; Adam and Eve," he said; "and twilight; and the world spread out like a garden! Do you see that glimmer over there to the left? That's the beginning of the river—our river!"
He had made her comfortable with some cushions piled against the trunk of a tree, and lighted a fire in a ring of blackened stones; then he brought her her supper, and ate his own on his knees beside her, watching eagerly for ways to serve her, laughing because she cringed when, from an overhanging bough, a spider let himself down upon her skirt, and hurrying to bring her a fresh cup of coffee, because an unhappy ant had scalded himself to death in her first cup. Afterward he would not let her "hurt her hands" by washing the dishes. When this was over, and the dusk was deepening, he went into the woods to the "lean-to" in which Lion was quartered, to see that the old horse was comfortable, but a minute later came crashing back through the underbrush, laughing, but provoked.
"That imp, Edith, didn't hitch him securely, and the old fellow has walked home, if you please—!"