“She is not at home. Let me take the basket. I will put it in the brook. Did you carry it?”
“I did. It weighs—I assure you—twenty pounds! I must see it bestowed.” And she followed him into the wood along a narrow path to a basin of brown water. The stream crawled forth here from under a fallen tamarack, and seemed to hesitate a little in the pool below. Then it gathered decision for flight, and leaped out, tripping across the tangled roots as it went. Carington laid the fish in the water, and two stones upon it.
“It is cooler here than outside,” he said. “Dorothy will be back in a little while.”
After this outrage on truth, he added:
“I came over to pay my milk-bill.”
Then Rose, of a sudden remembering what she had said the day before as to this errand of hers, became at once conscious of being in the country of a pleasant enemy. Therefore she made a neutral remark as she looked about her:
“How pretty it is here!”
“It is prettier a little way up, where the spring comes out under a rock.”
“I should like to see it, but I must go. I have no time to spare. I must go home. I have so much of nothing to do here, and there is nothing takes so much time as doing nothing!”
“That is more mysterious than my little spring. Do come. It is only a step.”