THE SEVEN DARLINGS

Six of the Darlings were girls. The seventh was a young man who looked like Galahad and took exquisite photographs. Their father had died within the month, and Mr. Gilpin, the lawyer, had just faced them, in family assembled, with the lamentable fact that they, who had been so very, very rich, were now astonishingly poor.

"My dears," he said, "your poor father made a dreadful botch of his affairs. I cannot understand how some men——"

"Please!" said Mary, who was the oldest. "It can't be any satisfaction to know why we are poor. Tell us just how poor we are, and we'll make the best of it. I understand that The Camp isn't involved in the general wreck."

"It isn't," said Mr. Gilpin, "but you will have to sell it, or at least, rent it. Outside The Camp, when all the estate debts are paid, there will be thirty or forty thousand dollars to be divided among you."

"In other words—nothing," said Mary; "I have known my father to spend more in a month."

"Income—" began Mr. Gilpin.

"Dear Mr. Gilpin," said Gay, who was the youngest by twenty minutes; "don't."

"Forty thousand dollars," said Mary, "at four per cent is sixteen hundred. Sixteen hundred divided by seven is how much?"

"Nothing," said Gay promptly. And all the family laughed, except Arthur, who was trying to balance a quill pen on his thumb.

"I might," said Mr. Gilpin helplessly, "be able to get you five per cent or even five and a half."

"You forget," said Maud, the second in age, and by some thought the first in beauty, "that we are father's children. Do you think he ever troubled his head about five and a half per cent, or even," she finished mischievously, "six?"

Arthur, having succeeded in balancing the quill for a few moments, laid it down and entered the discussion.

"What has been decided?" he asked. His voice was very gentle and uninterested.

"It's an awful pity mamma isn't in a position to help us," said Eve.

Eve was the third. After her, Arthur had been born; and then, all on a bright summer's morning, the triplets, Lee, Phyllis, and Gay.

"That old scalawag mamma married," said Lee, "spends all her money on his old hunting trips."

"Where is the princess at the moment?" asked Mr. Gilpin.

"They're in Somaliland," said Lee. "They almost took me. If they had, I shouldn't have called Oducalchi an old scalawag. You know the most dismal thing, when mamma and papa separated and she married him, was his turning out to be a regular old-fashioned brick. He can throw a fly yards further and lighter than any man I ever saw."

"And if you are bored," said Phyllis, "you say to him, 'Say something funny, Prince,' and he always can, instantly, without hesitation."

"All things considered," said Gay, "mamma's been a very lucky girl."

"Still," said Mary, "the fact remains that she's in no position to support us in the lap of luxury."

"Our kid brother," said Gay, "the future Prince Oducalchi, will need all she's got. When you realize that that child will have something like fifty acres of slate roofs to keep in order, it sets you thinking."

"One thing I insist on," said Maud, "mamma shan't be bothered by a lot of hard-luck stories——"

"Did it ever occur to you, Mr. Gilpin," said Arthur, in his gentle voice, "that my sisters are the six sandiest and most beautiful girls in the world? I've been watching them out of the corner of my eye, and wishing to heaven that I were Romney or Gainsborough. I'd give a million dollars, if I had them, for their six profiles, immortally painted in a row. But nowadays if a boy has the impulse to be a painter, he is given a camera; or if he wishes to be a musician, he is presented with a pianola. Luxury is the executioner of art. Personally I am so glad that I am going to be poor that I don't know what to do."

"Aren't you sorry for us, Artie?" asked Gay.

"Very," said he; "and I don't like to be called Artie."

Immediately after their father's funeral the Darlings had hurried off to their camp on New Moon Lake. An Adirondack "camp" has much in common with a Newport "cottage." The Darlings' was no exception. There was nothing camp-like about it except its situation and the rough bark slats with which the sides of its buildings were covered. There were very many buildings. There was Darling House, in which the family had their sleeping-rooms and bathrooms and dressing-rooms. There was Guide's House, where the guides, engineers, and handy men slept and cooked, and loafed in rainy weather. A passageway, roofed but open at the sides, led from Darling House to Dining House—one vast room, in the midst of which an oval table which could be extended to seat twenty was almost lost. Heads of moose, caribou, and elk (not "caught" in the Adirondacks) looked down from the walls. Another room equally large adjoined this. It contained tables covered with periodicals; two grand pianos (so that Mary and Arthur could play duets without "bumping"); many deep and easy chairs, and a fireplace so large that when it was half filled with roaring logs it looked like the gates of hell, and was so called.

Pantry House and Bar House led from Dining House to Smoke House, where an olive-faced chef, all in white, was surrounded by burnished copper and a wonderful collection of blue and white.

There was Work House with its bench, forge, and lathe for working wood and iron; Power House adjoining; and on the slopes of the mountain back of the camp, Spring House, from which water, ice-cold, at high pressure descended to circulate in the elaborate plumbing of the camp.

For guests, there were little houses apart—Rest House, two sleeping-rooms, a bath and a sitting-room; Lone House, in which one person could sleep, keep clean, write letters, or bask on a tiny balcony thrust out between the stems of two pine-trees and overhanging deep water; Bachelor House, to accommodate six of that questionable species. And placed here and there among pines that had escaped the attacks of nature and the greed of man were half a dozen other diminutive houses, accommodating from two to four persons.

The Camp was laid out like a little village. It had its streets, paved with pine-needles, its street lamps.

It had grown from simple beginnings with the Darling fortune; with the passing of this, it remained, in all its vast and intricate elaboration, like a white elephant upon the family's hands. From time to time they had tried the effect of giving the place a name, but had always come back to "The Camp." As such it was known the length and breadth of the North Woods. It was The Camp, par excellence, in a region devoted to camps and camping.

"Other people," the late Mr. Darling once remarked, "have more land, but nobody else has quite as much camp."

The property itself consisted of a long, narrow peninsula thrust far out into New Moon Lake, with half a mountain rising from its base. With the exception of a small village at the outlet of the lake, all the remaining lands belonged to the State, and since the State had no immediate use for them and since the average two weeks' campers could not get at them without much portage and expense, they were regarded by the Darlings as their own private preserves.

"The Camp," said Mr. Gilpin, "is, of course, a big asset. It is unique, and it is celebrated, at least among the people who might have the means to purchase it and open it. You could ask, and in time, I think, get a very large price."

They were gathered in the playroom. Mary, very tall and beautiful, was standing with her back to the fireplace.

"Mr. Gilpin," she said, "I have been coming to The Camp off and on for twenty-eight years. I will never consent to its being sold."

"Nor I," said Maud. "Though I've only been coming for twenty-six."

"In twenty-four years," said Eve, "I have formed an attachment to the place which nothing can break."

"Arthur," appealed Mr. Gilpin, "perhaps you have some sense."

"I?" said Arthur. "Why? Twenty-two years ago I was born here."

"Good old Arthur!" exclaimed the triplets. "We were born here, too—just nineteen years ago."

"But," objected Mr. Gilpin, "you can't run the place—you can't live here. Confound it, you young geese, you can't even pay the taxes."

Lee whispered to Gay.

"Look at Mary!"

"Why?"

"She's got a look of father in her eyes—father going down to Wall Street to raise Cain."

Mary spoke very slowly.

"Mr. Gilpin," she said, "you are an excellent estate lawyer, and I am very fond of you. But you know nothing about finance. We are going to live here whenever we please. We are going to run it wide open, as father did. We are even going to pay the taxes."

Mr. Gilpin was exasperated.

"Then you'll have to take boarders," he flung at her.

"Exactly," said Mary.

There was a short silence.

"How do you know," said Gay, "that they won't pick their teeth in public? I couldn't stand that."

"They won't be that kind," said Mary grimly. "And they will be so busy paying their bills that they won't have time."

"Seriously," said Arthur, "are you going to turn The Camp into an inn?"

"No," said Mary, "not into an inn. It has always been The Camp. We shall turn it into The Inn."

[II]

Mr. Gilpin had departed in what had perhaps been the late Mr. Darling's last extravagant purchase, a motor-boat which at rest was a streak of polished mahogany, and at full speed, a streak of foam. The reluctant lawyer carried with him instructions to collect as much cash as possible and place it to the credit of the equally reluctant Arthur Darling.

"Arthur," Mary had agreed, "is perhaps the only one of us who could be made to understand that a bank account in his name is not necessarily at his own personal disposal. Arthur is altruistically and Don Quixotically honest."

It was necessary to warm the playroom with a tremendous fire, as October had changed suddenly from autumn to winter. There was a gusty grayness in the heavens that promised flurries of snow.

Since Mary's proposal of the day before to turn the expensive camp into a profitable inn, the family had talked of little else, and a number of ways and means had already been chosen from the innumerable ones proposed. In almost every instance Arthur had found himself an amused minority. His platform had been: "Make them comfortable at a fair price."

But Mary, who knew the world, had retorted:

"We are not appealing to people who consider what they pay but to people who only consider what they get. Make them luxurious; and they will pay anything we choose to ask."

After Mr. Gilpin's chillsome departure in the Streak, the family resumed the discussion in front of the great fire in the playroom. Wow, the dog, who had been running a deer for twenty-four hours in defiance of all game-laws, was present in the flesh, but his weary spirit was in the land of dreams, as an occasional barking and bristling of his mane testified. Uncas, the chipmunk, had also demanded and received admittance to the council. For a time he had sat on Arthur's shoulder, puffing his cheeks with inconceivable rapidity, then, soporifically inclined by the warmth of the fire and the constant strain incident to his attempts to understand the ins and outs of the English language when rapidly and even slangily spoken, he dropped into Arthur's breast-pocket and went to sleep.

Arthur sighed. He was feeling immensely fidgety; but he knew that any sudden, irritable shifting of position would disturb the slumbers of Uncas, and so for nearly an hour he held himself heroically, almost uncannily, still.

Two years ago, dating from his graduation, Arthur had had a change of heart. He had been so dissipated as to give his family cause for the utmost anxiety. He had squandered money with both hands. He had had a regular time for lighting a cigarette, namely, when the one which he had been smoking was ready to be thrown away. He had been a keen hunter and fisherman. His chief use for domestic animals was to tease them and play tricks upon them. Then suddenly, out of this murky sky, had shone the clear light of all his subsequent behavior. He neither drank nor smoked; he neither slaughtered deer nor caught fish. He was never quarrelsome. He went much into the woods to photograph and observe. He became almost too quiet and self-effacing for a young man. He asked nothing of the world—not even to be let alone. He was patient under the fiendish ministrations of bores. He tamed birds and animals, spoiling them, as grandparents spoil grandchildren, until they gave him no peace, and were always running to him at inconvenient times because they were hungry, because they were sleepy, because they thought somebody had been abusing them, or because they wished to be tickled and amused.

"He's like a peaceful lake," Maud had once said, "deep in the woods, where the wind never blows," and Eve had nodded and said: "True. And there's a woman at the bottom of it."

The sisters all believed that Arthur's change of heart could be traced to a woman. They differed only as to the kind.

"One of our kind," Mary thought, "who wouldn't have him."

"One of our kind," thought Maud, "who couldn't have him."

And the triplets thought differently every day. All except Gay, who happened to know.

"But," said Maud, "if we are to appeal to people of our own class, all mamma's and papa's old friends and our own will come to us, and that will be much, too much, like charity."

"Right," said Mary. "Don't tell me I haven't thought of that. I have. Applications from old friends will be politely refused."

"We can say," said Eve, "that we are very sorry, but every room is taken."

"But suppose they aren't?" objected Arthur.

Eve retorted sharply.

"What is that to do with it? We are running a business, not a Bible class."

But Phyllis was pulling a long face.

"Aren't we ever to see any of our old friends any more?"

Lee and Gay nudged each other and began to tease her.

"Dearest Pill," they said, "all will yet be well. There is more than one Geoffrey Plantagenet in the world. You shall have the pick of all the handsome strangers."

"Oh, come, now!" said Arthur, "Phyllis is right. Now and then we must have guests—who don't pay."

"Not until we can afford them," said Mary. "Has anybody seen the sketch-map that papa made of the buildings?"

"I know where it is," said Arthur, "but I can't get it now; because Wow needs my feet for a pillow and at the moment Uncas is very sound asleep."

"Can't you tell us where it is?"

"Certainly," he said; "it's in the safe. The safe is locked."

"And where is the key?"

"Just under Uncas."

"Very well, then," said Mary, "important business must wait until Stripes wakes up. Meanwhile, I think we ought to make up our minds how and how much to advertise."

"There are papers," said Eve, "that all wealthy Americans always see, and then there's that English paper with all the wonderful advertisements of country places for sale or to let. I vote for a full-page ad in that. People will say, 'Jove, this must be a wonderful proposition if it pays 'em to advertise it in an English paper.'"

Everybody agreed with Eve except Arthur. He merely smiled with and at her.

"We can say," said Eve, "shooting and fishing over a hundred thousand acres. Does the State own as much as that, Arthur?"

He nodded, knowing the futility of arguing with the feminine conscience.

"Two hundred thousand?"

He nodded again.

"Then," said Eve, "make a note of this, somebody." Maud went to the writing-table. "Shooting and fishing over hundreds of thousands of acres."

"There must be pictures," said Maud, "in the text of the ad—the place is full of them; and if they won't do, Arthur can take others—when Wow and Uncas wake up."

"There must be that picture after the opening of the season," said Mary, "the year the party got nine bucks—somebody make a point of finding that picture."

"There are some good strings of trout and bass photographically preserved," said Gay.

"A picture of chef in his kitchen will appeal," said Lee.

"So will interiors," said Maud. "Bedrooms with vistas of plumbing. Let's be honestly grateful to papa for all the money he spent on porcelain and silver plate."

"Oh, come," said Mary, "we must advertise in the American papers, too. I think we should spend a good many thousand dollars. And of course we must do away with the big table in the dining-house and substitute little tables. I propose that we ransack the place for photographs, and that Maud try her hand at composing full-page ads. And, Arthur, please don't forget the sketch plan of the buildings—we'll have to make quite a lot of alterations."

"I've thought of something," said Maud. "Just a line. Part of the ad, of course, mentions prices. Now I think if we say prices from so and so up—it looks cheap and commonplace. At the bottom of the ad, then, after we've described all the domestic comforts of The Camp and its sporting opportunities, let's see if we can't catch the clientèle we are after with this:

"'Prices Rather High.'"

"Maud," said Mary, after swift thought, "your mind is as clear as a gem. Just think how that line would have appealed to papa if he'd been looking into summer or winter resorts. Make a note of it— What are you two whispering about?"

Lee and Gay looked up guiltily. They had not only been whispering but giggling. They said: "Nothing. Absolutely nothing."

But presently they put on sweaters and rowed off in a guide boat, so that they might converse without fear of being observed.

"Sure you've got it?" asked Lee.

"Umm," said Gay, "sure."

They giggled.

"And you think we're not just plain conceited?"

"My dear Lee," said Gay, "Mary, Maud, and Eve are famous for their faces and their figgers—have been for years, poor old things. Well, in my candid opinion, you and Phyllis are better-looking in every way. I look at you two from the cool standpoint of a stranger, and I tell you that you are incomparably good-looking."

Lee laughed with mischievous delight.

"And you look so exactly like us," she said, "that strangers can't tell us apart."

"For myself," said Gay demurely, "I claim nothing. Absolutely nothing. But you and Pill are certainly as beautiful as you are young."

"For the sake of argument, then," said Lee, "let's admit that we six sisters considered as a collection are somewhat alluring to the eye. Well—when the mail goes with the ads Maud is making up, we'll go with it, and make such changes in the choice of photographs as we see fit."

"That won't do," said Gay. "There will be proofs to correct."

"Then we'll wait till the proofs are corrected and sent off."

"Yes. That will be the way. It would be a pity for the whole scheme to fall through for lack of brains. I suppose the others would never agree?"

"The girls might," said Lee, "but Arthur never. He would rise up like a lion. You know, deep down in his heart he's a frightful stickler for the proprieties."

"We shall get ourselves into trouble."

"It will not be the first or the last time. And besides, we can escape to the woods if necessary, like Bessie Belle and Mary Grey."

"Who were they?"

"'They were two bonnie lassies.
They built a house on yon burn brae
And thecht it o'er wi' rashes.'"

[III]

If we except Arthur, whose knowledge of the Adirondack woods and waters was that of a naturalist, Lee and Gay were the sportsmen of the family. They had begun to learn the arts of fishing and hunting from excellent masters at the tender age of five. They knew the deeps and shallows of every lake and brook within many miles as intimately as a good housewife knows the shelves in her linen closet. They talked in terms of blazes, snags, spring holes, and runways. Each owned a guide boat, incomparably light, which she could swing to her shoulders and carry for a quarter of a mile without blowing. If Lee was the better shot, Gay could throw the more seductive fly.

There had been a guide in the girls' extreme youth, a Frenchman, Pierre Amadis de Troissac, who had perhaps begun life as a gentleman. Whatever his history, he had taught the precious pair the rudiments of French and the higher mysteries of fishing.

He had made a special study of spring holes, an essential in Adirondack trout-fishing, and whenever the Darlings wanted trout, it had only been necessary to tell De Troissac how many they wanted and to wait a few hours. On those occasions when he went fishing for the larder, Lee and Gay, two little roly-polies with round, innocent eyes, often accompanied him. It never occurred to De Troissac that the children could mark down the exact places from which he took fish, and, one by one and quite unintentionally, he revealed to them the hard-won secrets of his spring holes. The knowledge, however, went no further. They would have told Phyllis, of course, if she had been a sport. But she wasn't. She resembled Lee and Gay almost exactly in all other ways; but the spirit of pursuit and capture was left out of her. Twice she had upset a boat because a newly landed bass had suddenly begun to flop in the bottom of it, and once, coming accidentally upon a guide in the act of disembowelling a deer, she had gone into hysterics. She could row, carry a boat, swim, and find the more travelled trails; but, as Lee and Gay said: "Pill would starve in the woods directly the season was over."

She couldn't discharge even a twenty-two calibre rifle without shutting her eyes; she couldn't throw a fly twenty feet without snarling her leader. The more peaceful arts of out-of-doors had excited her imagination and latent skill.

In the heart of the woods, back of The Camp, not to be seen or even suspected until you came suddenly upon it, she had an acre of gardens under exquisite cultivation, and not a little glass. She specialized in nectarines, white muscats of Alexandria, new peas, and heaven-blue larkspur. But, for the sake of others, she grew to perfection beets, sweet corn, the lilies in variety, and immense Japanese iris.

As The Camp was to be turned into an inn which should serve its guests with delicious food, Phyllis and her garden became of immense importance and she began to sit much apart, marking seed catalogues with one end of a pencil and drumming on her beautiful teeth with the other.

Negotiations had been undertaken with a number of periodicals devoted to outdoor life, and a hundred schemes for advertising had been boiled down to one, which even Arthur was willing to let stand. To embody Mary's ideas of a profitable proposition into a page of advertising without being too absurd or too "cheap," had proved extremely difficult.

"We will run The Inn," she said, "so that rich people will live very much as they would if they were doing the running. One big price must cover all the luxuries of home. We must eliminate all extras—everything which is a nuisance or a trouble. Except for the trifling fact that we receive pay for it, we must treat them exactly as papa used to treat his guests. He gave his guests splendid food of his own ordering. When they wanted cigars or cigarettes, they helped themselves. There was always champagne for dinner, but if men preferred whiskey and soda, they told the butler, and he saw that they got it. What I'm driving at is this: There must be no difference in price for a guest who drinks champagne and one who doesn't drink anything. And more important still, we must do all the laundering without extra charge; guides, guide boats, guns, and fishing-tackle must be on tap—just as papa had everything for his guests. The one big price must include absolutely everything."

Added to this general idea, it was further conveyed in the final advertisement that the shooting was over hundreds of thousands of acres and the fishing in countless lakes and streams. And the last line of the ad, as had been previously agreed, was this:

"Prices Rather High."

And, as Gay said to Lee: "If that doesn't fetch 'em—you and I know something that maybe will."

The full-page ad began and ended with a portrait of Uncas, the chipmunk, front view, sitting up, his cheeks puffed to the bursting point. The centre of the page was occupied by a rather large view of The Camp and many of the charming little buildings which composed it, taken from the lake. Throughout the text were scattered reproductions—strings of trout, a black bear, nine deer hanging in a row, and other seductions to an out-of-door life. For lovers of good food there was a tiny portrait of the chef and adjoining it a photograph of the largest bunch of white muscats that had ever matured in Phyllis's vinery.

A few days before the final proofs began to come in from the advertising managers, there arrived, addressed to Gay, a package from a firm in New York which makes a specialty of developing and printing photographs for amateurs. Gay concealed the package, but Lee had noted its existence, and sighed with relief. A little later she found occasion to take Gay aside.

"Was the old film all right? Did they print well?"

Gay nodded. "It always was a wonderful picture," she said.

"Us for the tall timber," she said—"when they come out."

The final proofs being corrected and enveloped, Gay and Lee, innocent and bored of face, announced that, as there was nothing to do, they thought they would row the mail down to the village. It was a seven-mile row, but that was nothing out of the ordinary for them and it was arranged that the Streak should be sent after them in case they showed signs of being late for lunch.

Gay rowed with leisurely strokes, while Lee, seated in the stern, busied herself with a pair of scissors and a pot of paste. She was giving the finally corrected proofs that still more final correcting which she and Gay had agreed to be necessary.

They had decided that the centrepiece of the advertisement—a mere general view of The Camp—though very charming in its way, "meant nothing," and they had made up their unhallowed minds to substitute in its place one of those "fortunate snap-shots," the film of which Gay had—happened to preserve.

In this photograph the six Darling sisters were seated in a row, on the edge of The Camp float. Their feet and ankles were immersed. They wore black bathing-dresses, exactly alike, and the bathing-dresses were of rather thin material—and very, very wet.

The six exquisite heads perched on the six exquisite figures proved a picture which, as Lee and Gay admitted, might cause even a worthy young man to leave home and mother.

It was not until they were half-way home that Lee suddenly cried aloud and hid her face in her hands.

"For Heaven's sake," exclaimed Gay, "trim boat, and what's the matter anyway?"

"Matter?" exclaimed Lee; "that picture of us sits right on top of the line Prices Rather High. And it's too late to do anything about it!"

Gay turned white and then red, and then she burst out laughing. "'Tis awful," she said, "but it will certainly fetch 'em."

[IV]

The Camp itself underwent numerous changes during the winter; and even the strong-hearted Mary was appalled by the amount of money which it had been found necessary to expend. The playroom would, of course, be reserved for the use of guests, and a similar though smaller and inferior room had been thrust out from the west face of Darling House for the use of the family. Then Maud, who had volunteered to take charge of all correspondence and accounts, had insisted that an office be built for her near the dock. This was mostly shelves, a big fireplace, and a table. Here guests would register upon arrival; here the incoming mail would be sorted and the outgoing weighed and stamped. It had also been found necessary, in view of the very large prospective wash, to enlarge and renovate Laundry House and provide sleeping quarters for a couple of extra laundresses.

Those who are familiar with the scarcity and reluctance of labor in the Adirondacks will best understand how these trifling matters bit into the Darling capital.

Sometimes Mary, who held herself responsible for the possible failure of the projected inn, could not sleep at night. Suppose that the advertising, which would cost thousands of dollars, should fall flat? Suppose that not a single solitary person should even nibble at the high prices? The Darlings might even find themselves dreadfully in debt. The Camp would have to go. She suffered from nightmares, which are bad, and from daymares, which are worse. Then one day, brought across the ice from the village of Carrytown at the lower end of the lake, she received the following letter:

Miss Darling,
The Camp, New Moon Lake in the Adirondacks, New York.

Dear Madam:—Yesterday morning, quite by accident, I saw the prospectus of your inn on the desk of Mr. Burns, the advertising manager of The Four Seasons. I note with regret that you are not opening until the first of July. Would it not be possible for you to receive myself and a party of guests very much earlier, say just when the ice has gone out of the lake and the trout are in the warm shallows along the shores? Personally, it is my plan to stay on with you for the balance of the season, provided, of course, that all your accommodations have not been previously taken.

With regard to prices, I note only that they are "rather high." I would suggest that, as it would probably inconvenience you to receive guests prior to the date set for the formal opening of your camp, you name a rate for three early weeks which would be profitable to you. There will be six men in my party, including myself.

Very truly yours,
Samuel Langham.

Mary, her face flushed with the bright colors of triumph, read this letter aloud to the assembled family.

"Does anybody," she asked, "know anything about Samuel Langham? Is he a suitable person?"

"I know of him," said Arthur, smiling at some recollection or other. "He is what the newspapers call a 'well-known clubman.' He is rich, fat, good-natured, and not old. It is that part of your prospectus which touches upon the cuisine that has probably affected him. His father was a large holder of Standard Oil securities."

"As for me," said Gay, "I've seen him. Do you remember, Phyllis, being asked to a most 'normous dinner dance at the Redburns' the year we came out? At the last minute you caught cold and wanted to back out, but Mary said that wasn't done, and so I went in your place, and, as usual, nobody knew the difference. Well, Mr. Langham was there. I didn't meet him, but I remember I watched him eat. He is very smug-looking. He didn't like the champagne. I remember that. He lifted his glass hopefully, took one swallow, put his glass down, and never touched it again. His face for the rest of dinner had the expression of one who has been deeply wronged. I thought of Louis XVI mounting the scaffold."

"I do wish," said Mary, "that we knew what kind of wine the creature likes."

"Father left a splendid collection," said Arthur. "Take Mr. Langham into the cellar. He'll enjoy that. Let him pick his own bottle."

In the event, Maud sat down in her new office and wrote Mr. Langham that he and his five guests could be received earlier in the season. And then, with fear and trembling, she named a price per diem that amounted to highway robbery.

Mr. Langham's answer was prompt and cheerful. He asked merely to be notified when the ice had gone out of the lake.

"Well," said Mary, with a long-drawn sigh of relief, "the prices don't seem to have frightened him nearly as much as they frightened us. But, after all, the prospectus was alluring—though we say it that shouldn't."

Lee and Gay were troubled by qualms of conscience. The advertisements of The Camp were to appear in the February number of some of the more important periodicals, and the two scapegraces were beginning to be horribly alarmed.

Magazines have a way of being received last by those most interested in seeing them. And before even a copy of The Four Seasons reached the Darlings, there came a number of letters from people who had already seen the advertisement in it. One letter was from a very old friend of the family, and ran as follows:

My Dear Mary:

How could you! I have seen your advertisement of The Camp in The Four Seasons. It is earning much talk and criticism. I don't know what you could have been thinking of. I have always regarded you as one of the sanest and best-bred women I know. But it seems that you are not above sacrificing your own dignity to financial gain——

"Well, in the name of all that's ridiculous," exclaimed Mary; "of all that's impertinent!—will somebody kindly tell me what my personality has to do with our prospectus of The Camp?"

Those who could have told her held their tongues and quaked inwardly. The others joined in Mary's surprise and indignation. Even Arthur, who hated the whole innkeeping scheme, was roused out of his ordinary placidity.

"I shall write to the horrid old woman," said Mary, "and tell her to mind her own business. I shall also tell her that we are receiving so many applications for accommodations that we don't know how to choose. That isn't quite true, of course; but we have received some. Since I am not above sacrificing my dignity"—she went on angrily—"to financial gain, I may as well throw a few lies into the bargain."

The next day, addressed to "The Camp," came the long-expected number of The Four Seasons. Arthur opened it and began to turn the leaves. Presently, from the centre of a page, he saw his six beautiful sisters looking him in the face.

"Mary!" he called, in such a voice that she came running. She looked and turned white. Eve came, and Maud and Phyllis.

"Who is responsible for this—" cried Arthur, "for this sickening—this degraded piece of mischief?"

"You corrected the final proofs yourself," said Maud.

"And sealed them up. If I find that some mischief-maker in the office of The Four Seasons has been playing tricks——"

"The mischief-makers are to be found nearer home," said Mary. "Don't you remember that Lee and Gay took the proofs to the post-office. They said they were bored and could think of nothing to do. This is what they were thinking of doing!"

"Where are they?" he said in a grim voice.

"Now, Arthur," said Maud, "think before you say anything to them that you may regret. As for the picture of us in our bathing-suits—well, I, for one, don't see anything dreadful about it. In fact, I think we look rather lovely."

Arthur groaned.

"I want to talk to Lee and Gay," he said. "My sisters—an advertisement in a magazine—for drummers and newsboys to make jokes about——"

He grew white and whiter, until his innocent sisters were thoroughly frightened. Then he started out of the playroom in search of Lee and Gay.

In or about The Camp they were not to be found. Nobody had seen them since breakfast. With this information, he returned to the playroom.

"They've run away," he said, "and I'm going after them."

"I wouldn't," said Mary. "The harm's been done. You can't very well spank them. I wish you could. You can only scold—and what earthly good will that do them, or you?"

"I don't know that anything I may say," said Arthur, "will do them any good. I live in hopes."

"Have you any idea where they've gone?"

"I'll cast about in a big circle and find their tracks."

When Arthur, mittened and snow-shoed, had departed in search of Lee and Gay, the remaining sisters gathered about the full-page advertisement in The Four Seasons, and passed rapidly from anger to mild hysterics. Mary was the last to laugh.

And she said: "Girls, I will tell you an awful secret. I never would have consented to this, but as long as Lee and Gay have gone and done it, I'm—glad."

"The only thing I mind," said Eve, "is Arthur. He'll take it hard."

"We can't help that," said Maud. "Business is business. And this wretched, shocking piece of mischief spells success. I feel it in my bones. There's no use being silly about ourselves. We've got our way to make in the world—and, as a sextet——"

She lingered over the picture.

"As a sextet, there's no use denying that we are rather lovely to look at."

Phyllis put in a word blindly.

"Maud," she said, "among the applications you have received, how many are from women?"

Maud laughed aloud.

"None," she said.

"There wouldn't be," said Eve.

"Well," said Mary, "compared to the rest of you, I'm quite an old woman, and I say—so much the better."

[V]

Even on going into the open air from a warmed room, it would not have struck you as a cold day. But thermometers marked a number of degrees worse than zero. The sky was bright and blue. Not a breath of wind stirred. In the woods the underbrush was hidden by the smooth accumulations of snow, so that the going was open.

The Adirondack winter climate is such that a man runs less risk of getting too cold than of getting too warm. Arthur, moving swiftly in a great circle so that at some point he should come upon the tracks of his culprit sisters, shed first his mittens and then his coat. The former he thrust into his trousers pocket, and he hung the latter to a broken limb where he could easily find it on his return.

"There would be some sense in running away in summer," he thought. "It would take an Indian or a dog to track them then, but in winter—I gave them credit for more sense."

He came upon the outgoing marks of their snow-shoes presently, just beyond Phyllis's garden, to the north of the camp. In imagination he saw the two lithe young beauties striding sturdily and tirelessly over the snow, and then and there the extreme pinnacles of his anger toppled and fell. There is no occupation to which a maiden may lend herself so virginal as woodmanship. And he fell to thinking less of his young sisters' indiscretion than of the extreme and unsophisticated innocence which had led them into it. What could girls know of men, anyway? What did his sisters know of him? That he had been extravagant and rather fast. Had they an inkling of what being rather fast meant? His smooth forehead contracted with painful thoughts. Even Mary's indignation upon the discovery of the photograph in The Four Seasons had not matched his own. She had been angry because she was a gentlewoman, and gentlewomen shun publicity. She had not even guessed at the degradation to which broadcast pictures of beautiful women are subjected. His anger turned from his sisters presently and glowered upon the whole world of men; his hands closed to strike, and opened to clutch and choke. That Lee and Gay had done such a thing was earnest only of innocence coupled with mischief. They must know that what they had done was wrong, since they had fled from any immediate consequences, but how wrong it was they could never dream, even in nightmares. Nor was it possible for him to explain. How, then, could any anger which he might visit upon them benefit? And who was he, when it came to that, to assume the unassailable morality of a parent?

It came to this: That Arthur followed the marks of Lee's and Gay's snow-shoes mechanically, and raged, not against them, not against the world of men, but against himself. He had said once in jest that many an artistic impulse had been crushed by the camera and the pianola. But how pitifully true this had been in his own case! If he had been born into less indulgence, he might have painted, he might have played. The only son in a large family of daughters, his father and mother had worshipped the ground upon which his infant feet had trod. He had never known what it was to want anything. He had never been allowed to turn a hand to his own honest advantage. He was the kind of boy who, under less golden circumstances, would have saved his pocket-money and built with his own hands a boat or whatever he needed. There is a song: "I want what I want when I want it." Arthur might have sung: "I get what I'm going to want and then I don't want it."

His contemporaries had greatly envied him, when, as a mere matter of justice, they should have pitied him. All his better impulses had been gnarled by indulgence. He had done things that showed natural ability; but of what use was that? He was too old now to learn to draw. He played rather delightfully upon the piano, or any other instrument, for that matter. To what end? He could not read a note.

There was nothing that Arthur could not have done, if he had been let alone. There were many things that he would have done.

At college he had seen in one smouldering flash of intuition how badly he had started in the race of life. When others were admiring his many brilliancies, he was mourning for the lost years when, under almost any guidance save that of his beloved father, he might have laid such sturdy foundations to future achievements—pedestals on which to erect statues.

Self-knowledge had made him hard for a season and cynical. As a tired sea-gull miscalculates distance and dips his wings into the sea, so Arthur, when he thought that he was merely flying low the better to see and to observe, had alighted without much struggling in a pool of dissipation and vice.

The memory was more of a weariness to him than a sharp regret. Of what use is remorse—after the fact? Let it come before and all will be well.

At last, more by accident than design, he drew out of the muddy ways into which he had fallen and limped off—not so much toward better things as away from worse.

Then it was that Romance had come for him, and carried him on strong wings upward toward the empyrean.

Even now, she was only twenty. She had married a man more than twice her age. He had been her guardian, and she had felt that it was her duty. Her marriage proved desperately unhappy. She and Arthur met, and, as upon a signal, loved.

For a few weeks of one golden summer, they had known the ethereal bliss of seeing each other every day. They met as little children, and so parted. They accepted the law and convention which stood between them, not as a barrier to be crossed or circumvented but with childlike faith as a something absolutely impassable—like the space which separates the earth and the moon.

They remained utterly innocent in thought and deed, merely loved and longed and renounced so very hard that their poor young hearts almost broke.

Not so the "old man."

It happened, in the autumn of that year, that he brought his wife to New York, in whose Wall Street he had intricate interests. He learned that she was by way of seeing more of Arthur than a girl of eighteen married to a man of nearly fifty ought to see. He did not at once burst into coarse abuse of her, but, worldly-wise, set detectives to watch her. He had, you may say, set his heart upon her guilt. To learn that she was utterly innocent enraged him. One day he had the following conversation with a Mr. May, of a private detective bureau:

"You followed them?"

"To the park."

"Well?"

"They bought a bag of peanuts and fed the squirrels."

"Go on."

"Then they rode in a swan-boat. Then they walked up to the reservoir and around it. Then they came back to the hotel."

"Did they separate in the office?"

"On the sidewalk."

"But last night? She said she was dining with her sister and going to the play. What did she do last night?"

"She did what she said. Believe me, sir—if I know anything of men and women, you're paying me to run fool's errands for you. They don't need any watching."

"You have seen them—kiss?"

"Never."

"Hold hands?"

"I haven't seen any physical demonstration. I guess they like each other a lot. And that's all there is to it."

But the "old man" made a scene with her, just such a scene as he would have made if the detective's report had been, in effect, the opposite of what it was. He assumed that she was guilty; but, for dread of scandal, he would not seek a divorce. He exacted a promise that she would not see Arthur, or write to him, or receive letters from him.

Then, having agreed with certain magnates to go out to China upon the question of a great railroad and a great loan, he carried her off with him, then and there. So that when Arthur called at the hotel, he was told that they had gone but that there was a note for him. If it was from the wife, the husband had dictated it:

Don't try to see me ever any more. If you do, it will only make my life a hell on earth.

That had been the tangible end of Arthur's romance. But the intangible ends were infinite and not yet. His whole nature had changed. He had suffered and could no longer bear to inflict pain.

He lifted his head and looked up a little slope of snow. Near the top, wonderfully rosy and smiling, sat his culprit sisters. He had forgotten why he had come. He smiled in his sudden embarrassment.

"Don't shoot, colonel," called Gay, "and we'll come down."

"Promise, then," he said, "that you'll never be naughty again."

"We promise," they said.

And they trudged back to camp, with jokes and laughter and three very sharp appetites.

[VI]

Beyond seeing to it that the alluring picture of his sisters should not appear in any future issues of the magazines, Arthur did not refer to the matter again. The girls, more particularly Lee and Gay, always attributed the instant success of The Camp to the picture; but it is sanely possible that an inn run upon such very extravagant principles was bound to be a success anyway. America is full of people who will pay anything for the comforts of home with the cares and exasperations left out.

A majority of the early applications received at The Camp office, and politely rejected by Maud, were from old friends of the family, who were eagerly willing to give its fallen finances a boost. But the girls were determined that their scheme should stand upon its own meritorious feet or not at all.

When Samuel Langham learned that the ice was going out of New Moon Lake, he wrote that he would arrive at Carrytown at such and such an hour, and begged that a boat of some sort might be there to meet him. His guests, he explained, would follow in a few days.

"Dear me," said Maud, "it will be very trying to have him alone—just like a real guest. If he'd only bring his friends with him, why, they could entertain him. As it is, we'll have to. Because, even if we are innkeepers now, we belong to the same station in life that he does, and he knows it and we know it. I don't see how we can ever have the face to send in a bill afterward."

"I don't either," said Mary, "but we must."

"I've never pictured him," said Arthur, "as a man who would brave early spring in the Adirondacks for the sake of a few trout."

"I bet you my first dividend," said Lee, "that his coat is lined with sable."

It was.

As the Streak, which had gone to Carrytown to meet him, slid for the dock (his luggage was to follow in the Tortoise, a fatter, slower power-boat), there might have been seen standing amidships a tall, stout gentleman of about thirty-six or more, enveloped in a handsome overcoat lined with sable.

He wore thick eye-glasses which the swiftness of the Streak's going had opaqued with icy mist, so that for the moment Mr. Samuel Langham was blind as a mole. Nevertheless, determined to enjoy whatever the experience had in store for him, he beamed from right to left, as if a pair of keen eyes were revealing to him unexpected beauties and delights.

Arthur, loathing the rôle, was on the float to meet him.

On hearing himself addressed by name, Mr. Samuel Langham removed one of his fur-lined gloves and thrust forward a plump, well-groomed hand.

"I believe that I am shaking hands with Mr. Darling," he said in a slow, cultivated voice; "but my glasses are blurred and I cannot see anything. Is my foot going for the float—or the water?"

"Step boldly," said Arthur; and, in a hurried aside, as he perceived the corner of a neatly folded greenback protruding between two of Mr. Langham's still-gloved fingers: "You are not to be subjected to the annoyance of the tipping system. We pay our servants extra to make the loss up to them."

Mr. Langham's mouth, which was rather like a Cupid's bow, tightened. And he handed the greenback to the engineer of the Streak, just as if Arthur's remonstrance had not been spoken. On the way to the office he explained.

"Whenever I go anywhere," he said, "I find persons in humble situations who smile at me and wish me well. I smile back and wish them well. It is because, at some time or other, I have tipped them. To me the system has never been an annoyance but a delightful opportunity for the exercise of tact and judgment."

He came to a dead halt, planting his feet firmly.

"I shall be allowed to tip whomsoever I like," he said flatly, "or I shan't stay."

"Our ambition," said Arthur stiffly, "is to make our guests comfortable. Our rule against tipping is therefore abolished."

They entered the office. Mr. Langham could now see, having wiped the fog from his glasses. He saw a lovely girl in black, seated at a table facing him. Beyond her was a roaring fire of backlogs. Arthur presented Mr. Langham.

"Are you frozen?" asked Maud. "Too cold to write your name in our brand-new register?"

He took the pen which she offered him and wrote his name in a large, clear hand, worthy of John Hancock.

"It's the first name in the book," he said. "It's always been a very lucky name for me. I hope it will be for you."

Arthur had escaped.

"There is one more formality," said Maud: "breakfast."

"I had a little something in my car," said Mr. Langham; "but if it wouldn't be too much trouble—er—just a few little eggs and things."

"How would it be," said Maud, "if I took you straight to the kitchen? My sister Mary presides there, and you shall tell her exactly what you want, and she will see that you get it."

A rosy blush mounted Mr. Langham's good-natured face.

"Oh," he said, with the deepest sincerity, "if I am to have the entrée to the kitchen, I shall be happy. I will tell you a secret. At my club I always breakfast in the kitchen. It's against the rules, but I do it. A friendly chef—beds of glowing charcoal—burnished copper—piping-hot tidbits."

It was up-hill to Smoke House, and Mr. Langham, in his burdensome overcoat, grew warm on the way, and was puffing slightly when he got there.

"Mary," Maud called—"Mr. Langham!"

"The kitchen is the foundation of all domestic happiness," said he. "I have come to yours as fast as I could. I think—I know, that I never saw a brighter, happier-looking kitchen."

He knew also that he had never seen so beautiful a presiding deity.

"Your sister," he said, "told me that I could have a little breakfast right here." And he repeated the statement concerning his club kitchen.

"Of course, you can!" said Mary.

"Just a few eggs," he said, "and if there's anything green——"

They called the chef. He was very happy because the season had begun. He assigned Mr. Langham a seat from which to see and at which to be served, then with the wrist-and-finger elegance of a prestidigitator, he began to prepare a few eggs and something green.

"The trout—" Mary began dutifully, as it was for the sake of these that Mr. Langham had ostensibly come so early in the season.

"Trout?" he said.

"The fishing—" She made a new beginning.

"The fishing, Miss Darling," he said, "will be of interest to my friends. For my part, I don't fish. I have, in common with the kind of boat from which fishing is done, nothing but the fact that we are both ticklish. I saw your prospectus. I said: 'I shall be happy there, and well taken care of.' Something told me that I should be allowed to breakfast in the kitchen. The more I thought about it the less I felt that I could wait for the somewhat late opening of your season, so I pretended to be a fisher of trout. And here I am. But, mark you," he added, "a few trout on the table now and then—I like that!"

"You shall have them," said Mary, "and you shall breakfast in the kitchen. I do—always."

"Do you?" he exclaimed. "Why not together, then?"

His eyes shone with pleasure.

"I should be too early for you," she said.

"You don't know me. Is it ever too early to eat? Because I am stout, people think I have all the moribund qualities that go with it. As a matter of fact, I rise whenever, in my judgment, the cook is dressed and down. Is it gross to be fond of food? So many people think so. I differ with them. Not to care what you eat is gross—in my way of thinking. Is there anything, for instance, more fresh in coloring, more adequate in line, than a delicately poached egg on a blue-and-white plate? You call this building Smoke House? I shall always be looking in. Do you mind?"

"Indeed we don't," said Mary. "Do we, chef?"

Chef laid a finger to his lips. It was no time for talk. "Never disturb a sleeping child or a cooking egg," was one of his maxims.

"I knew that I should be happy here," said Mr. Langham. "I am."

Whenever he had a chance he gazed at Mary. It was her face in the row of six that had lured him out of all his habits and made him feel that the camp offered him a genuine chance for happiness. To find that she presided over the kitchen had filled his cup to the brim. But when he remembered that he was fat and fond of good things to eat and drink, his heart sank.

He determined that he would eat but three eggs. They were, however, prepared in a way that was quite new to him, and in the determined effort to discern the ingredients and the method he ate five.

"There is something very keen about your Adirondack air," he explained guiltily.

But Mary had warmed to him. Her heart and her reputation were involved in the cuisine. She knew that the better you feed people the more they love you. She was not revolted by Mr. Langham's appetite. She felt that even a canary of a man must have fallen before the temptation of those eggs.

They were her own invention. And chef had executed them to the very turn of perfection.

Almost from the moment of his arrival, then, Mr. Samuel Langham began to eat his way into the heart of the eldest Miss Darling.

In culinary matters a genuine intimacy sprang up between them. They exchanged ideas. They consulted. They compared menus. They mastered the contents of the late Mr. Darling's cellars.

Mr. Langham chose Lone House for his habitation. He liked the little balcony that thrust out over the lake between the two pine-trees. And by the time that his guests were due to arrive, he had established himself, almost, in the affections of the entire family.

"He may be greedy," said Arthur, "but he's the most courteous man that ever 'sat at meat among ladies'!"

"He's got the kindest heart," said Mary, "that ever beat."

[VII]

Mr. Langham's five guests arrived somewhat noisily, smoking five long cigars. Lee and Gay, watching the float from a point of vantage, where they themselves were free from observation, observed that three of the trout fishermen were far older than they had led themselves to expect.

"That leaves only one for us," said Gay.

"Why?"

"Can't you see from here that the fifth is an Englishman?"

"Yes," said Lee. "His clothes don't fit, and yet he feels perfectly comfortable in them."

"It isn't so much the clothes," said Gay, "as the face. The other faces are excited because they have ridden fast in a fast boat, though they've probably often done it before. Now he's probably never been in a fast boat in his life till to-day, and yet he looks thoroughly bored."

The Englishman without changing his expression made some remark to the other five. They roared. The Englishman blushed, and looked vaguely toward a dark-blue mountain that rose with some grandeur beyond the farther shore of the lake.

"Do you suppose," said Lee, "that what he said was funny or just dumb?"

"I think it was funny," said Gay, "but purely accidental."

"I think I know the other youth," said Lee; "I think I have danced with him. Didn't Mr. Langham say there was a Renier among his guests?"

"H. L.," Gay assented.

"That's the one," Lee remembered. "Harry Larkins Renier. We have danced. If he doesn't remember, he shall be snubbed. I like the old guy with the Mark Twain hair."

"Don't you know him? I do. I have seen his picture often. He's the editor of the Evening Star. Won't Arthur be glad!"

"What's his name?"

"Walter Leyden O'Malley. He's the literary descendant of the great Dana. Don't talk to me, child; I know a great deal."

Gay endeavored to assume the look of an encyclopædia and failed.

"Mr. Langham," said Lee, "mentioned three other names, Alston, Pritchard, and Cox. Which do you suppose is which?"

"I think that Pritchard is the very tall one who looks like a Kentucky colonel; Cox is the one with the very large face; of course, the Englishman is Alston."

"I don't."

"We can find out from Maud."

When the new arrivals, escorted by Arthur and Mr. Langham, had left the office, Lee and Gay hurried in to look at their signatures and to consult Maud as to identities.

The Kentucky-colonel-looking man proved to be Alston. Cox had the large face, and the Englishman—John Arthur Merrivale Pritchard, as was to be expected—wrote the best hand. Mr. O'Malley, the famous editor, wrote the worst. His signature looked as if it had been traced by an inky worm writhing in agony.

"Tell us at once," Gay demanded, "what they are like."

Maud regarded her frolicsome sisters with inscrutable eyes, and said:

"At first, you think that Mr. Cox is a heartless old cynic, but when you get to know him really well—I remember an instance that occurred in the early sixties——"

"Oh, dry up!" said Lee. "Are they nice and presentable, like fat old Sam Langham?"

"The three old ones," said Maud, "made me think of three very young boys just loose from school. Messrs. Renier and Pritchard, however, seem more used to holidays. There is, however, a complication. All five wish to go fishing as soon as they can change into fishing clothes, and there aren't enough guides to go around."

"What's the trouble?" asked Gay eagerly.

"Bullard," Maud explained, "has sent word that his wife is having a baby, and Benton has gone up to Crotched Lake West to see if the ice is out of it. That leaves only three guides to go around. Benton oughtn't to have gone. Nobody told him to. But he once read the Declaration of Independence, and every now and then the feeling comes over him that he must act accordingly."

"But," exclaimed Lee, "what's the matter with Gay and me?"

"Nothing, I hope," said Maud; "you look well. I trust you feel well."

"We want to be guides," said Gay; "we want to be useful. Hitherto we've done nothing to help. Mary works like a slave in the kitchen; you here. Eve will never leave the laundry once the wash gets big. Phyllis has her garden, in which things will begin to grow by and by, but we—we have no excuse for existence—none whatever. Now, I could show Mr. Renier where the chances of taking fish are the best."

"No," said Lee firmly; "I ought to guide him. It's only fair. He once guided me—I've always remembered—bang into a couple who outweighed us two to one, and down we went."

"Mary will hardly approve of you youngsters going on long expeditions with strange young men," Maud was quite sure; "and, of course, Arthur won't."

Lee and Gay began to sulk.

At that moment Arthur came into the office.

"Halloo, you two!" he said. "Been looking for you, and even shouting. The fact is, we're short of guides, and Mary and I think——"

Lee and Gay burst into smiles.

"What did we tell you, Maud? Of course, we will. There are no wiser guides in this part of the woods."

"That," said Arthur, "is a fact. The older men looked alarmed when I suggested that two of my sisters—you see, they've always had native-born woodsmen and even Indians——"

"Then," said Lee, "we are to have the guileless youths. I speak for Renier."

"Meanie," said Gay.

"Lee ought to have first choice," said Arthur. "It's always been supposed that Lee is your senior by a matter of twenty minutes."

"True or not," said Gay, "she looks it. Then I'm to guide the Englishman."

"If you don't mind." Arthur regarded her, smiling. He couldn't help it. She was so pretty. "And I'd advise you not to be too eager to show off. Mr. Pritchard has hunted and fished more than all of us put together."

"That little pink-faced snip!" exclaimed Gay. "I'll sure see how much he knows."

Half an hour later she was rowing him leisurely in the direction of Placid Brook, and examining his somewhat remarkable outfit with wondering eyes. This was not difficult, since his own eyes, which were clear brown, and very shy, were very much occupied in looking over the contents of the large-tackle box.

"If you care to rig your rod," said Gay presently, "and cast about as we go, you might take something between here and the brook."

"Do you mean," he said, "that you merely throw about you at random, and that it is possible to take fish?"

"Of course," said she—"when they are rising."

"But then the best one could hope for," he drawled, "would be indiscriminate fish."

"Just what do you mean by that?"

"Why!"—and this time he looked up and smiled very shyly—"if you were after elephant and came across a herd, would you pick out a bull with a fine pair of tusks, or would you fire indiscriminately into the thick of them, and perhaps bring down the merest baby?"

"I never heard of picking your fish," said Gay.

"Dear me," he commented, "then you have nearly a whole lifetime of delightful study before you!"

He unslung a pair of field-glasses, focussed them, and began to study the surface of the placid lake, not the far-off surface but the surface within twenty or thirty feet. Then he remarked:

"Your flies aren't greatly different from ours. I think we shall find something nearly right. One can never tell. The proclivities of trout and char differ somewhat. I have never taken char."

"You don't think you are after char now, do you?" exclaimed Gay. "Because, if so—this lake contains bass, trout, lake-trout, sunfish, shiners, and bullheads, but no char."

Pritchard smiled a little sadly and blushed. He hated to put people right.

"Your brook-trout," he said, "your salmo fontinalis, isn't a trout at all. He's a char."

Gay put her back into the rowing with some temper. She felt that the Englishman had insulted the greatest of all American institutions. The repartee which sprang to her lips was somewhat feeble.

"If a trout is a char," she said angrily, "then an onion is a fruit."

To her astonishment, Mr. Pritchard began to laugh. He dropped everything and gave his whole attention to it. He laughed till the tears came and the delicate guide boat shook from stem to stern. Presently the germ of his laughing spread, and Gay came down with a sharp attack of it herself. She stopped rowing. Two miles off, a loon, that most exclusive laugher of the North Woods, took fright, dove, and remained under for ten minutes.

The young people in the guide boat looked at each other through smarting tears.

"I am learning fast," said Gay, "that you count your fish before you catch them, that trout are char, and that Englishmen laugh at other people's jokes."

She rowed on.

"Don't forget to tell me when you've chosen your fish," she remarked.

"You shall help me choose," he said; "I insist. I speak for a three-pounder."

"The event of a lifetime!"

"Why, Miss Gay," he said, "it's all the event of a lifetime. The Camp, the ride in the motor-boat, the wonderful, wonderful breakfast, water teeming with fish, the woods, and the mountains—millions of years ago it was decreed that you and I should rock a boat with laughter in the midst of New Moon Lake. And yet you speak of a three-pounder as the event of a lifetime! My answer is a defiance. We shall take one salmo fontinalis—one wily char. He shall not weigh three pounds; he shall weigh a trifle more. Then we shall put up our tackle and go home to a merry dinner."

"Mr. Pritchard," said Gay, "I'll bet you anything you like that you don't take a trout—or a char, if you like—that will weigh three pounds or over. I'll bet you ten to one."

"Don't do that," he said; "it's an even shot. What will you bet?"

"I'll bet you my prospective dividends for the year," she said, "against——"

"My prospective title?"

He looked rather solemn, but laughter bubbled from Gay.

"It's a good sporting proposition," said Pritchard. "It's a very sound title—old, resonant—and unless you upset us and we drown, tolerably certain to be mine to pay—in case I lose."

"I don't bet blindly," said Gay. "What is the title?"

"I shall be the Earl of Merrivale," said he; "and if I fail this day to take a char weighing three pounds or over, you will be the Countess of Merrivale."

"Dear me!" said Gay, "who ever heard of so much depending on a mere fish? But I don't like my side of the bet. It's all so sudden. I don't know you well enough, and you're sure to lose."

"I'll take either end of the bet you don't like," said Mr. Pritchard gravely. "If I land the three-pounder, you become the countess; if I don't, I pay you the amount of your dividends for the year. Is that better?"

"Much," smiled Gay; "because, with the bet in this form, there is practically no danger that either of us will lose anything. My dividends probably won't amount to a row of pins, and you most certainly will not land so big a fish."

Meanwhile they had entered the mouth of Placid Brook. The surface was dimpling—rings became, spread, merged in one another, and were not. The fish were feeding.

"Let us land in the meadow," said Mr. Pritchard, his brown eyes clear and sparkling, "and spy upon the enemy."

"Are you going to leave your rod and things in the boat?"

"For the present—until we have located our fish."

They landed, and he advanced upon the brook by a detour, stealthily, crouching, his field-glasses at attention. Once he turned and spoke to Gay in an authoritative whisper:

"Try not to show above the bushes."

[VIII]

The sun was warm on the meadow, and although the bushes along its margin were leafless, the meadow itself had a greenish look, and the feel of the air was such that Gay, upon whom silence and invisibility had been enjoined, longed to dance in full sight of the trout and to sing at the top of her voice: "Oh, that we two were Maying!" Instead, she crouched humbly and in silence at Pritchard's side, while he studied the dimpling brook through his powerful field-glasses.

Gay had never seen red Indians except in Buffalo Bill's show, where it is made worth their while to be very noisy. But she had read her Cooper and her Ballantyne,

"Ballantyne, the brave,
And Cooper of the wood and wave,"

and she knew of the early Christian patience with which they are supposed to go about the business of hunting and fishing.

Pritchard, she observed, had a weather-red face and high cheek-bones. He was smooth-shaved. He wore no hat. But for his miraculously short-cut hair, his field-glasses, his suit of coarse Scotch wool, whose colors blended so well with the meadow upon which he crouched, he might have been an Indian. His head, the field-glasses, the hands which clasped them, moved—nothing else.

"Is it a bluff?" thought Gay. "Is he just posing, or is there something in it?"

Half an hour passed—three quarters. Gay was pale and grimly smiling. Her legs had gone to sleep. But she would not give in. If an Englishman could fish so patiently, why, so could she. She was fighting her own private battle of Bunker Hill—of New Orleans.

Pritchard lowered his glasses, handed them to Gay, and pointed up the brook and across, to where a triangular point of granite peered a few inches above the surface. Gay looked through the glasses, and Pritchard began to whisper in her ear:

"Northwest of that point of rock, about two feet—keep looking just there, and I'll try to tell you what to see."

"There's a fish feeding," she answered; "but he must be a baby, he just makes a bubble on the surface."

"There are three types of insect floating over him," said Pritchard; "I don't know your American beasts by name, but there is a black, a brown, and a grayish spiderlike thing. He's taking the last. If you see one of the gray ones floating where he made his last bubble, watch it."

Gay presently discerned such an insect so floating, and watched it. It passed within a few inches of where the feeding trout had last risen and disappeared, and a tiny ring gently marked the spot where it had been sucked under. Gay saw a black insect pass over the fatal spot unscathed, then browns; and then, once more, a gray, very tiny in the body but with longish legs, approached and was engulfed.

"Now for the tackle box," Pritchard whispered.

They withdrew from the margin of the brook, Gay in that curious ecstasy, half joy, half sorrow, induced by sleepy legs. She lurched and almost fell. Pritchard caught her.

"Was the vigil too long?" he asked.

"I liked it," she said. "But my legs went to sleep and are just waking up. Tell me things. There were fish rising bold—jumping clean out—making the water boil. But you weren't interested in them."

"It was noticeable," said Pritchard, "and perhaps you noticed that one fish was feeding alone. He blew his little rings—without fear or hurry—none of the other fishes dared come anywhere near him. He lives in the vicinity of that pointed rock. The water there is probably deep and, in the depths, very cold. Who knows but a spring bubbles into a brook at the base of that rock? The fish lives there and rules the water around him for five or six yards. He is selfish, fat, and old. He feeds quietly because nobody dares dispute his food with him. He is the biggest fish in this reach of the brook. At least, he is the biggest that is feeding this morning. Now we know what kind of a fly he is taking. Probably I have a close imitation of it in my fly box. If not, we shall have to make one. Then we must try to throw it just above him—very lightly—float it into his range of vision, and when he sucks it into his mouth, strike—and if we are lucky we shall then proceed to take him."

Gay, passionately fond of woodcraft, listened with a kind of awe.

"But," she said, seeing an objection, "how do you know he weighs three pounds and over?"

"Frankly," said Pritchard, "I don't. I am gambling on that." He shot her a shy look. "Just hoping. I know that he is big. I believe we shall land him. I hope and pray that he weighs over three pounds."

Gay blushed and said nothing. She was beginning to think that Pritchard might land a three-pounder as well as not—and she had light-heartedly agreed, in that event, to become the Countess of Merrivale. Of course, the bet was mere nonsense. But suppose, by any fleeting chance, that Pritchard should not so regard it? What should she do? Suppose that Pritchard had fallen victim to a case of love at first sight? It would not, she was forced to admit (somewhat demurely), be the first instance in her own actual experience. There was a young man who had so fallen in love with her, and who, a week later, not knowing the difference—so exactly the triplets resembled each other—had proposed to Phyllis.

They drew the guide boat up onto the meadows and Pritchard, armed with a scoop-net of mesh as fine as mosquito-netting, leaned over the brook and caught one of the grayish flies that were tickling the appetite of the big trout.

This fly had a body no bigger than a gnat's.

Pritchard handed Gay a box of japanned tin. It was divided into compartments, and each compartment was half full of infinitesimal trout flies. They were so small that you had to use a pair of tweezers in handling them.

Pritchard spread his handkerchief on the grass, and Gay dumped the flies out on it and spread them for examination. And then, their heads very close together, they began to hunt for one which would match the live one that Pritchard had caught.

"But they're too small," Gay objected. "The hooks would pull right through a trout's lip."

"Not always," said Pritchard. "How about this one?"

"Too dark," said Gay.

"Here we are then—a match or not?"

The natural fly and the artificial placed side by side were wonderfully alike.

"They're as like as Lee and me," said Gay.

"Lee?"

"Three of us are triplets," she explained. "We look exactly alike—and we never forgive people who get us mixed up."

Pritchard abandoned all present thoughts of trout-fishing by scientific methods. He looked into her face with wonder.

"Do you mean to tell me," said he, "that there are two other D-D-Darlings exactly like you?"

"Exactly—a nose for a nose; an eye for an eye."

"It isn't true," he proclaimed. "There is nobody in the whole world in the least like you."

"Some time," said Gay, "you will see the three of us in a row. We shall look inscrutable and say nothing. You will not be able to tell which of us went fishing with you and which stayed at home——"

"'This little pig went to market,'" he began, and abruptly became serious. "Is that a challenge?"

"Yes," said Gay. "I fling down my gauntlet."

"And I," said Pritchard, "step forward and, in the face of all the world, lift it from the ground—and proclaim for all the world to hear that there is nobody like my lady—and that I am so prepared to prove at any place or time—come weal, come woe. Let the heavens fall!"

"If you know me from the others," Gay's eyes gleamed, "you will be the first strange young man that ever did, and I shall assign and appoint in the inmost shrines of memory a most special niche for you."

Pritchard bowed very humbly.

"That will not be necessary," he said. "If I land the three-pounder. In that case, I should be always with you."

"I wish," said Gay, "that you wouldn't refer so earnestly to a piece of nonsense. Upon repetition, a joke ceases to be a joke."

Pritchard looked troubled.

"I'm sorry," he said simply. "If it is the custom of the country to bet and then crawl, so be it. In Rome, I hasten to do as the Romans do. But I thought our bet was honorable and above-board. It seems it was just an—an Indian bet."

Gay flushed angrily.

"You shall not belittle anything American," she said. "It was a bet. I meant it. I stand by it. If you catch your big fish I marry you. And if I have to marry you, I will lead you such a dance——"

"You wouldn't have to," Pritchard put in gently, "you wouldn't have to lead me, I mean. If you and I were married, I'd just naturally dance—wouldn't I? When a man sorrows he weeps; when he rejoices he dances. It's all very simple and natural——"

He turned his face to the serene heavens, and, very gravely:

"Ah, Lord!" he said. "Vouchsafe to me, undeserving but hopeful, this day, a char—salmo fontinalis—to weigh a trifle over three pounds, for the sake of all that is best and sweetest in this best of all possible worlds."

If his face or voice had had a suspicion of irreverence, Gay would have laughed. Instead, she found that she wanted to cry and that her heart was beating unquietly.

Mr. Pritchard dismissed sentiment from his mind, and with loving hands began to take a powerful split-bamboo rod from its case.

[IX]

Gay's notion of scientific fishing might have been thus summed: Know just where to fish and use the lightest rod made. Her own trout-rod weighed two and a half ounces without the reel. Compared to it, Pritchard's was a coarse and heavy instrument. His weighed six ounces.

"You could land a salmon with that," said Gay scornfully.

"I have," said Pritchard. "It's a splendid rod. I doubt if you could break it."

"Doesn't give the fish much of a run for his money."

"But how about this, Miss Gay?"

He showed her a leader of finest water-blue catgut. It was nine feet long and tapered from the thickness of a human hair to that of a thread of spider-spinning. Gay's waning admiration glowed once more.

"That wouldn't hold a minnow," she said.

"We must see about that," he answered; "we must hope that it will hold a very large char."

He reeled off eighty or ninety feet of line, and began to grease it with a white tallow.

"What's that stuff?" Gay asked.

"Red-deer fat."

"What for?"

"To make the line float. We're fishing with a dry-fly, you know."

Gay noticed that the line was tapered from very heavy to very fine.

"Why is that?" she asked.

"It throws better—especially in a wind. The heavy part will carry a fly out into half a gale."

He reeled in the line and made his leader fast to it with a swift, running hitch, and to the line end of the leader he attached the fly which they had chosen. Upon this tiny and exquisite arrangement of fairy hook, gray silk, and feathers, he blew paraffin from a pocket atomizer that it might float and not become water-logged.

"Do we fish from the shore or the boat?" Gay asked.

"From this shore."

"You'll never reach there from this shore."

"Then I've misjudged the distance. Are you going to use the landing-net for me, in case it's necessary?"

Gay caught up the net and once more followed his stealthy advance upon the brook.

Pritchard had one preliminary look through the field-glasses, straightened his bent back, turned to her with a sorrowing face, and spoke aloud.

"He's had enough," he said. "He's stopped feeding."

Gay burst out laughing.

"And our fishing is over for the day? This shall be said of you, Mr. Pritchard, that you are a merciful man. You are not what is called in this country a 'game hog.'"

"Thank you," he said gravely. "But if you think the fishing is over for the day, you don't know a dry-fly fisherman when you see one. We made rather a late start. See, most of the fish have stopped feeding. They won't begin again much before three. The big fellow will be a little later. He has had more than the others; he is older; his digestion is no longer like chain lightning; he will sleep sounder, and dream of the golden days of his youth when a char was a trout."

"That," said Gay, "is distinctly unkind. I have been snubbed enough for one day. Are we to stand here, then, till three or four o'clock, till his royal highness wakes up and calls for breakfast?"

"No," said Pritchard; "though I would do so gladly, if it were necessary, in order to take this particular fish——"

"You might kneel before your rod," said Gay, "like a knight watching his arms."

"To rise in the morning and do battle for his lady—I repeat I should do so gladly if it would help my chances in the slightest. But it wouldn't."

He rested his rod very carefully across two bushes.

"The thing for us to do," he went on, "is to have lunch. I've often heard of how comfortable you American guides can make the weary, wayworn wanderer at the very shortest notice."

"Is that a challenge?"

"It is an expression of faith."

Their eyes met, and even lingered.

"In that case," said Gay, "I shall do what I may. There is cold lunch in the boat, but the wayworn one shall bask in front of a fire and look upon his food when it is piping hot. Come!"

Gay rowed him out of the brook and along the shore of the lake for a couple of miles. She was on her mettle. She wished him to know that she was no lounger in woodcraft. She put her strong young back into the work of rowing, and the fragile guide boat flew. Her cheeks glowed, and her lips were parted in a smile, but secretly she was filled with dread. She knew that she had brought food, raw and cooked; she could see the head of her axe gleaming under the middle seat; she would trust Mary for having seen to it that there was pepper and salt; but whether in the pocket of the Norfolk jacket there were matches, she could not be sure. If she stopped rowing to look, the Englishman would think that she had stopped because she was tired. And if, later, it was found that she had come away without matches, he would laugh at her and her pretenses to being a "perfectly good guide."

She beached the boat upon the sand in a wooded cove, and before Pritchard could move had drawn it high and dry out of the water. Then she laughed aloud, and would not tell him why. She had discovered in the right-hand pocket of her coat two boxes of safety-matches, and in the left pocket three.

"Don't," said Gay, "this is my job."

She lifted the boat easily and carried it into the woods. Pritchard had wished to help. She laid the boat upon soft moss at the side of a narrow, mounting trail, slung the package of lunch upon her shoulders, and caught up her axe.

"Don't I help at all?" asked Pritchard.

"You are weary and wayworn," said Gay, "and I suppose I ought to carry you, too. But I can't. Can you follow? It's not far."

A quarter of a mile up the hillside, between virgin pines which made one think bitterly of what the whole mountains might be if the science of forestry had been imported a little earlier in the century, the steep and stony trail ended in an open space, gravelly and abounding in huge bowlders, upon which the sun shone warm and bright. In the midst of the place was a spring, black and slowly bubbling. At the base of one great rock, a deep rift in whose face made a natural chimney, were traces of former fires.

"Wait here," commanded Gay.

Her axe sounded in a thicket, and she emerged presently staggering under a load of balsam. She spread it in two great, fragrant mats. Then once more she went forth with her axe and returned with fire-wood.

Pritchard, a wistful expression in his eyes, studied her goings and her comings, and listened as to music, to the sharp, true ringing of her axe.

"By Jove," said he to himself, "that isn't perspiration on her forehead—it's honest sweat!"

In spite of the bright sunshine, the heat of the fire was wonderfully welcome, and began to bring out the strong, delicious aroma of the balsam. Gay sat upon her heels before the fire and cooked. There was a sound of boiling and bubbling. The fragrance of coffee mingled with the balsam and floated heavenward. During the swift preparation of lunch they hardly spoke. Twice Pritchard begged to help and was twice refused.

She spread a cloth between the mats of balsam upon one of which Pritchard reclined, and she laid out hot plates and bright silver with demure precision.

"Miss Gay," he said very earnestly, "I came to chuckle; I thought that at least you would burn the chicken and get smoke in your eyes, but I remain to worship the deity of woodcraft. An Indian could not do more swiftly or so well."

Gay swelled a little. She had worked very hard; nothing had gone wrong, so far. She was not in the least ashamed of herself. But her greatest triumph was to come.

Uncas, the chipmunk, had that morning gone for a stroll in the forest. He had the spring fever. He had crossed Placid Brook, by a fallen log; he had climbed trees, hunted for last year's nuts, and fought battles of repartee with other chipmunks. About lunch time, thinking to return to Arthur and recount the tale of his wanderings, he smelled a smell of cooking and heard a sound of voices, one of which was familiar to him. He climbed a bowlder overlooking the clearing, and began to scold. Gay and Pritchard looked up.

"My word!" said Pritchard, "what a bold little beggar."

Now, to Gay, the figure of Uncas, well larded with regular meals, was not to be confounded with the slim little stripes of the spring woods. She knew him at once, and she spoke nonchalantly to Pritchard.

"If you're a great deal in the woods," she said, "you scrape acquaintance with many of the inhabitants. That little pig and I are old friends. You embarrass him a little. He doesn't know you. If you weren't here, he'd come right into my lap and beg."

Pritchard looked at her gravely.

"Truly?" he said.

"I think he will anyway," said Gay, and she made sounds to Uncas which reassured him and brought him presently on a tearing run for her lap. Here, when he had been fed, he yawned, stretched himself, and fell asleep.

"Mowgli's sister!" said Pritchard reverently. "Child, are there the scars of wolves' teeth on your wrists and ankles?"

"No, octogenarian," said Gay; "there aren't any marks of any kind. What time is it?"

"It is half-past two."

"Then you shall smoke a cigarette, while I wash dishes."

She slid the complaining Uncas from her lap to the ground.

"Unfortunately," said Pritchard, "I didn't bring a cigarette."

"And you've been dying for a smoke all this time? Why don't you ask the guide for what you want?"

"Have you such a thing?"

"I have."

"But you—you yourself don't—do you?" He looked troubled.

"No," said Gay. "But my father was always forgetting his, and it made him so miserable I got into the habit of carrying a full case years ago whenever we went on expeditions. He used to be so surprised and delighted. Sometimes I think he used to forget his on purpose, so that I could have the triumph of producing mine."

Pritchard smoked at ease. Gay "washed up." Uncas, roused once more from slumber by the call of one of his kind, shook himself and trotted off into the forest.

Gay, scouring a pan, was beginning to feel that she had known Pritchard a long time. She had made him comfortable, cared for him in the wild woods, and the knowledge warmed her heart.

Pritchard was saying to himself:

"We like the same sort of things—why not each other?"

"Miss Gay," he said aloud.

"What?"

"In case I land the three-pounder and over, I think I ought to tell you that I'm not very rich, and I know you aren't. Would that matter to you? I've just about enough," he went on tantalizingly, "to take a girl on ripping good trips into central Africa or Australia, but I can't keep any great state in England—Merrivale isn't a show place, you know—just a few grouse and pheasants and things, and pretty good fishin'."

"However much," said Gay, "I may regret my bet, there was nothing Indian about it. I'm sure that you are a clean, upright young man. I'm a decent sort of girl, though I say it that shouldn't. We might do worse. I've heard that love-matches aren't always what they are cracked up to be. And I'm quite sure that I want to go to Africa and hunt big game."

"Thank you," said Pritchard humbly. "And at least there would be love on one side."

"Nonsense," said Gay briskly. "I'm ready, if you are."

Pritchard jumped to his feet and threw away his cigarette.

"Now," he said, "that you've proved everything, won't you let me help?"

Gay refused him doubtfully, and then with a burst of generosity:

"Why, yes," she said, "and, by the way, Mr. Pritchard, there was no magic about the chipmunk. He's one my brother trained. He lives at The Camp, and he was just out for a stroll and happened in on us. I don't want you to find out that I'm a fraud from any one—but me."

[X]

The big trout was once more feeding. And Pritchard began to cast his diminutive fly up-stream and across. But he cast and got out line by a system that was new to Gay. He did not "whip" the brook; he whipped the air above it. He never allowed his fly to touch the water but drew it back sharply, and, at the same time, reeled out more line with his left hand, when it had fallen to within an inch or two of the surface. His casts, straight as a rifle-shot, lengthened, and reached out toward the bowlder point near which the big trout was feeding, until he was throwing, and with consummate ease, a line longer than Gay had ever seen thrown.

"It's beautiful," she whispered. "Will you teach me?"

"Of course," he answered.

His fly hovered just above the ring which the trout had just made. Pritchard lengthened his line a foot, and cast again and again, with no further change but of an inch or two in direction.

"There's a little current," he explained. "If we dropped the fly into the middle of the ring, it would float just over his tail and he wouldn't see it. He's looking up-stream, whence his blessings flow. The fly must float straight down at him, dragging its leader, and not dragged by it."

All the while he talked, he continued casting with compact, forceful strokes of his right wrist and forearm. At last, his judgment being satisfied by the hovering position attained by fly and leader, he relaxed his grip of the rod; the fly fell upon the water like thistle-down, floated five or six inches, and was sucked under by the big trout.

Pritchard struck hard.

There was a second's pause, while the big trout, pained and surprised, tried to gather his scattered wits. Three quarters of Pritchard's line floated loosely across the brook, but the leader and the fly remained under, and Pritchard knew that he had hooked his fish.

Then, and it was sudden—like an explosion—the whole length of floating line disappeared, and the tip of Pritchard's powerful rod was dragged under after it.

The reel screamed.

"It's a whale!" shouted Gay, forgetting how much depended upon the size of the fish, "a whale!"

The time for stealthy movements and talk in whispers was over. Gay laughed, shouted, exhorted, while Pritchard, his lips parted, his cheeks flushed, gayly fought the great fish.

"Go easy; go easy!" cried Gay. "That hook will never hold him."

But Pritchard knew his implements, and fished with a kind of joyous, strong fury.

"When you hang 'em," he exulted, "land em."

The trout was a great noble potentate of those waters. Years ago he had abandoned the stealthy ways of lesser fish. He came into the middle of the brook where the water is deep and there is freedom from weeds and sunken timber, and then up and down and across and across, with blind, furious rushes he fought his fight.

It was the strong man without science against the strong man who knows how to box. The steady, furious rushes, snubbed and controlled, became jerky and spasmodic; in a roar and swirl of water the king trout showed his gleaming and enormous back; a second later the sunset colors of his side and the white of his belly. Inch by inch, swollen by impotent fury, galvanically struggling and rushing, he followed the drag of the leader toward the beach, where, ankle-deep in the water, Gay crouched with the landing-net.

She trembled from head to foot as a well-bred pointer trembles when he has found a covey of quail and holds them in control, waiting for his master to walk in upon them.

The big trout, still fighting, turning, and raging, came toward the mouth of the half-submerged net.

"How big is he, Miss Gay?"

The voice was cool and steady.

"He's five pounds if he's an ounce," her voice trembled. "He's the biggest trout that ever swam.

"He isn't a trout," said Pritchard; "he's a char."

If Gay could have seen Pritchard's face, she would have been struck for the first time by a sort of serene beauty that pervaded some of its expressions. The smile which he turned upon her crouching figure had in it a something almost angelic.

"Bring him a little nearer," she cried, "just a little."

"You're sure he weighs more than three pounds?"

"Sure—sure—don't talk, land him, land him——"

For answer Pritchard heaved strongly upward upon his rod and lifted the mighty fish clear of the water. One titanic convulsion of tortured muscles, and what was to be expected happened. The leader broke a few inches from the trout's lip, and he returned splashing to his native element, swam off slowly, just under the surface, then dove deep, and was seen no more.

"Oh!" cried Gay. "Why did you? Why did you?"

She had forgotten everything but the fact that the most splendid of all trout had been lost.

"Why did you?" she cried again.

"Because," he said serenely and gently, smiling into her grieved and flushed face, "I wouldn't have you as the payment of a bet. I will have you as a gift or not at all."

They returned to The Camp, Pritchard rowing.

"I owe you your prospective dividends for the year," he said. "If they are large, I shall have to give you my note and pay as I can."

She did not answer.

"I think you are angry with me," he said. "I'd give more than a penny for your thoughts."

"I was thinking," said she, "that you are very good at fishing, but that the art of rowing an Adirondack guide boat has been left out of you."

"Truly," he said, "was that what you were thinking?"

"No," she said; "I was thinking other things. I was thinking that I ought to go down on my knees and thank you for breaking the leader. You see, I'd made up my mind to keep my word. And, well, of course, it's a great escape for me.

"Why? Was the prospect of marrying me so awful?"

"The prospect of marrying a man who would rather lose a five-pound fish than marry me—was awful."

Pritchard stopped rowing, and his laughter went abroad over the quiet lake until presently Gay's forehead smoothed and, after a prelude of dimples, she joined gayly in.

When Pritchard could speak, he said:

"You don't really think that, do you?"

"I don't know what I think," said Gay. "I'm just horrid and cross and spoiled. Don't let's talk about it any more."

"But I said," said he, "I said 'As a bet, no; but as a gift'—oh, with what rapture and delight!"

"Do you mean that?" She looked him in the face with level eyes.

Once more he stopped rowing.

"I love you," he said, "with my whole heart and soul."

"Don't," said Gay, "don't spoil a day that, for all its ups and downs, has been a good day, a day that, on the whole, I've loved—and let's hurry, please, because I stood in the water and it was icy."

After that Pritchard rowed with heroic force and determination; he lacked, however, the knack which overlapping oar handles demand, and at every fifteenth or sixteenth stroke knocked a piece of "bark" from his knuckles.

Smarting with pain, he smiled gently at her from time to time.

"Will you guide me to-morrow?"

"To-morrow," she said, "there will be enough real guides to go around."

"You really are, aren't you?" he said.

"What?"

"Angry with me."

"Oh, no—I think—that what you said—what you said—was a foolish thing to say. If I came to you with my sisters Lee and Phyllis, you wouldn't know which of the three I was, and yet—you said—you said——"

"It isn't a question of words—it's a question of feeling. Do you really think I shouldn't know you from your sisters?"

"I am sure of it," said Gay.

"But if you weren't?"

"Then I should still think that you had tried to be foolish but I shouldn't be angry."

"How," said Pritchard, his eyes twinkling, "shall I convince the girl I love—that I know her by sight?"

Gay laughed. The idea seemed rather comical to her.

"To-night," she said, "when you have dined, walk down to the dock alone. One of us three will come to you and say: 'Too bad we didn't have better luck.' And you won't know if she's Lee or Phyllis or me."

Pritchard smoked upon the dock in the light of an arc-lamp. A vision, smiling and rosy, swept out of the darkness, and said:

"Too bad we didn't have better luck!"

"I beg your pardon," said Pritchard, "you're not Miss Gay, but I haven't had the pleasure of being presented to Miss Lee or Miss Phyllis."

The vision chuckled and beat a swift, giggling retreat to a dark spot among the pines, where other giggles awaited her.

A second vision came.

"Too bad we didn't have better luck!"

Pritchard smiled gravely into the vision's eyes, and said in so low a voice that only she could hear:

"Bad luck? I have learned to love you with all my heart and soul."

Silence. An answering whisper.

"How did you know me?"

"How? Because my heart says here is the only girl in all the world—see how different, how more beautiful and gentle she is than all other girls."

"But I'm not Gay—I'm Phyllis."

"If you are Phyllis," he whispered, "then you never were Gay."

She laughed softly.

"I am Gay."

"Why tell me? I know. Am I forgiven?"

"There is nothing," she said swiftly, "to forgive," and she fled swiftly.

To her sisters waiting among the pines she gave explanation.

"Of course, he knew me."

"How?"

"Why, he said there couldn't be any doubt; he said I was so very much better-looking than any sister of mine could possibly be."

Forthwith Lee pinioned Gay's arms and Phyllis pulled her ears for her.

Mr. Pritchard paced the dock, offering rings of Cuban incense to the stars.

From Play House came the sounds which men make when they play cards and do not care whether they win or lose.

Maud was in her office, adding a column of figures which the grocer had sent in. The triplets, linked arm in arm, joined her. Arthur came, and Eve and Mary.

They agreed that they were very tired and ready for bed.

"It's going to be a success, anyway," said Mary. "That seems certain."

"We must have the plumber up," said Eve; "the laundry boiler has sprung a leak. Who's that in your pocket, Arthur?"

"Uncas. He came in exhausted after a long day in the woods. Something unusual happened to him. I know, because he tried so very hard to tell me all about it just before he went to sleep, and of course he couldn't quite make me understand. I think he was trying to warn me of something—trying to tell me to keep my eyes peeled."

The family laughed. Arthur was always so absurd about his pets. All laughed except Gay. She, in a dark corner, like the rose in the poem, blushed unseen.

[XI]

When their week was up, Mr. Langham's guests, Messrs. O'Malley, Alston, and Cox, felt obliged to go where income called them. Renier, however, who had only been at work a year, decided that he did not like his job, and would try for another in the fall. Lee delivered herself of the stern opinion that a rolling stone gathers no moss, and Renier answered that his late uncle had been a fair-to-middling moss gatherer, and that to have more than one such in a given family was a sign of low tastes. "I have a little money of my own," he said darkly, "and, what's more, I have a little hunch." To his face Lee upbraided him for his lack of ambition and his lack of elegance, but behind his back she smiled secretly. She was well pleased with herself. It had only taken him three days to get so that he knew her when he saw her, and for a young man of average intellect and eyesight that was almost a record.

The triplets were not only as like as three lovely vases cast in the same mould but it amused them to dress alike, without so much as the differentiation of a ribbon, and to imitate each other's little tricks of speech and gesture. It was even possible for them to fool their own brother at times when he happened to be a little absent-minded.

Every day Renier fished for many hours, and always the guide who handled his boat and showed him where to throw his flies was Lee.

"They're only children," said Mary, "and I think they're getting altogether too chummy."

Arthur did not answer, and for the very good reason that Mary's words were not addressed to him, nor were they addressed to Maud or Eve. Indeed, at the moment, these three were sound asleep in their beds. It was to that plumper and earlier bird, Mr. Samuel Langham, that Mary had spoken. The end of a kitchen table, set with blue-and-white dishes and cups that steamed, fragrantly separated them. They had formed a habit of breakfasting together in the kitchen, and it had not taken Mary long to discover that Sam Langham's good judgment was not confined to eatables and drinkables. She consulted him about all sorts of things. She felt as if she had known him (and trusted him) all her life.

"Renier," he said, "is one of the few really eligible young men I know. That is why I asked him up here. I don't mean that my intention was match-making, but when I saw your picture in the advertisement, I said to myself: 'The Inn is no place for attractive scalawags. Any man that goes there on my invitation must be sound, morally and financially.' Young Renier is as innocent of anything evil as Miss Lee herself. If they take a fancy to each other—of course it's none of my business, but, my dear Miss Darling—why not?"

"Coffee?"

"Thanks."

"An egg?"

"Please."

Mary was very tactful. She never said: "Some more coffee?" She never said: "Another egg?"

"Some people," said Mr. Langham, smiling happily, "might say that we were getting too chummy."

"Suppose," said Mary, "that somebody did say just that?"

"I should reply," said Mr. Langham thoughtfully, "that of the few really eligible men that I know, I myself am, on the whole, the most eligible."

Mary laughed.

"Construe," she said.

"In the first place," he continued, "and naming my qualifications in the order of their importance, I don't ever remember to have spoken a cross word to anybody; secondly, unless I have paved a primrose path to ultimate indigestion and gout, there is nothing in my past life to warrant mention. To be more explicit, I am not in a position to be troubled by—er—'old agitations of myrtle and roses'; third, something tells me that in a time of supreme need it would be possible for me to go to work; and, fourth, I have plenty of money—really plenty of money."

Mary smiled almost tenderly.

"I can't help feeling," she said, "that I, too, am a safe proposition. I am twenty-nine. My wild oats have never sprouted. I think we may conclude that they were never sown. The Inn was my idea—mostly, though I say it that shouldn't. And The Inn is going to be a success. We could fill every room we've got five times—at our own prices."

"I pronounce your bill of health sound," said Mr. Langham. "Let us continue to be chummy."

"Coffee?"

"Thanks."

Whatever chance there may have been for Gay and Pritchard to get "too chummy"—and no one will deny that they had made an excellent start—was promptly knocked in the head by Arthur. It so happened that, in a desperately unguarded moment, when Arthur happened to be present, Pritchard mentioned that he had spent a whole winter in the city of Peking. The name startled Arthur as might the apparition of a ghost.

"Which winter?" he asked. "I mean, what year?"

Pritchard said what year, and added, "Why do you ask?"

Arthur had not meant to ask. He began a long blush, seeing which Gay turned swift heels and escaped upon a suddenly ejaculated pretext.

"Why," said Arthur lamely, "I knew some people who were in Peking that winter—that's all."

"Then," said Pritchard, "we have mutual friends. I knew every foreigner in Peking. There weren't many."

Although Arthur had gotten the better of his blush, he felt that Pritchard was eying him rather narrowly.

"They," said Arthur, "were a Mr. and Mrs. Waring."

"I hope," said Pritchard, "that he wasn't a friend of yours."

"He was not," said Arthur, "but she was. I was very fond of her."

"Nobody," said Pritchard, "could help being fond of her. But Waring was an old brute. One hated him. He wouldn't let her call her soul her own. He was always snubbing her. We used to call her the 'girl with the dry eyes.'"

"Why?" asked Arthur.

"It's a Chinese idea," said Pritchard. "Every woman is supposed to have just so many tears to shed. When these are all gone, why, then, no matter what sorrows come to her, she has no way of relieving them."

Arthur could not conceal his agitation. And Pritchard looked away. He wished to escape. He thought that he could be happier with Gay than with her brother. But Arthur, agitation or no agitation, was determined to find out all that the young Englishman could tell him about the Warings. He began to ask innumerable questions: "What sort of a house did they live in?" "How do Christians amuse themselves in the Chinese capital?" "Did Mrs. Waring ride?" "What were some of her friends like?" etc., etc. There was no escaping him. He fastened himself to Pritchard as a drowning man to a straw. And his appetite for Peking news became insatiable. Pritchard surrendered gracefully. He went with Arthur on canoe trips and mountain climbs; at night he smoked with him in the open camp. And, in the end, Arthur gave him his whole confidence; so that, much as Pritchard wished to climb mountains and go on canoe trips with Gay, he was touched, interested, and gratified, and then all at once he found himself liking Arthur as much as any man he had ever known.

"There is something wonderfully fine about your brother," he said to Gay. "At first I thought he was a queer stick, with his pets and his secret haunts in the woods, and his unutterable contempt for anything mean or worldly. We ought to dress him up in proof armor and send him forth upon the quest of some grail or other."

"Grails," said Gay, "and auks are extinct."

"Grails extinct!" exclaimed Pritchard. He was horrified.

"Why, my dear Miss Gay, if ever the world offered opportunities to belted knights without fear and without reproach, it's now."

"I suppose," said she, "that Arthur has told you all about his—his mix-up."

Pritchard nodded gravely.

"Is that the quest he ought to ride on?"

"No—it won't do for Arthur. He might be accused of self-interest. That should be a matter to be redressed by a brother knight."

"Or a divorce court."

"Miss Gay!"

"I don't think it's nice for one's brother to be in love with a married woman."

"It isn't," said Pritchard gravely, "for him. It's hell."

"We," said Gay, "never knew her."

"She's not much older than you," said Pritchard. "If I'd never seen you, I'd say that she was the prettiest girl I'd ever seen. But she's gentler and meeker than even you'd be in her boots. She isn't self-reliant and able."

"You talk as if you'd been in love with her yourself."

"I? I thought I was talking as if I was in love with you."

"Looks like it, don't it?" said she. "Spending all your time with a girl's brother."

"Not doing what you most want to do," said Pritchard, "is sometimes thought knightly."

"Do you know," she said critically, "sometimes I think you really like me a lot. And sometimes I think that I really like you. The funny thing is that it never seems to happen to both of us at the same time. There's Arthur looking for you. Do me a favor—shake him and come for a tramp with me."

"I can't," said Pritchard simply. "I've promised. But to-morrow——"

"Certainly not," said she.

[XII]

Warm weather and the real opening of the season arrived at the same time. The Camp hummed with the activities and the voices of people. And it became possible for the Darlings to withdraw a little into their shells and lead more of a family life. As Maud said:

"When there were more proprietors than guests, we simply had to sail in and give the guests a good time. But now that the business is in full blast, we mustn't be amateurs any more."

Langham, Renier, and the future Earl of Merrivale remained, of course, upon their well-established footing of companionship, but the Darlings began to play their parts of innkeepers with the utmost seriousness and to fight shy of any social advances from the ranks of their guests.

Indeed, for the real heads of the family, Mary, Maud, and Eve, there was serious work to be done. For, to keep thirty or forty exigent and extravagant people well fed, well laundered, well served, and well amused is no frisky skirmish but a morning-to-night battle, a constant looking ahead, a steady drain upon the patience and invention.

In Sam Langham Mary found an invaluable ally. He knew how to live, and could guess to a nicety the "inner man" of another. Nor did he stop at advice. Being a celebrated bon viveur he went subtly among the guests and praised the machinery of whose completed product they were the consumers and the beneficiaries. He knew of no place, he confided, up and down the whole world, where, for a sum of money, you got exactly what you wanted without asking for it.

"Take me for an example," he would say. "I have never before been able to get along without my valet. Here he would be a superfluity. I am 'done,' you may say, better than I have ever been able to do myself. And I know what I'm talking about. What! You think the prices are really rather high. Think what you are getting, man—think!"

Among the new guests was a young man from Boston by the name of Herring. He had written that he was convalescing from typhoid fever and that his doctor had prescribed Adirondack air.

Renier knew Herring slightly and vouched for him.

"They're good people," he said, "his branch of the Herring family—the 'red Herrings' they are called locally—if we may speak of Boston as a 'locality'—he's the reddest of them and the most showy. If there's anything he hasn't tried, he has to try it. He isn't good at things. But he does them. He's the fellow that went to the Barren Lands with a niblick. What, you never heard of that stunt? He was playing in foursome at Myopia. He got bunkered. He hit the sand a prodigious blow and the ball never moved. His partner said: 'Never mind, Syd, you hit hard enough to kill a musk-ox.'

"'Did I?' said Herring, much interested, 'but I never heard of killing a musk-ox with a niblick. Has it ever been done? Are there any authorities one might consult?'

"His partner assured him that 'it' had never been done. Herring said that was enough for him. The charm of Herring is that he never smiles; he's deadly serious—or pretends to be. When they had holed out at the eighteenth, Herring took his niblick and said: 'Well, so long. I'm off to the Barren Lands.'

"They bet him there and then that he would neither go to the Barren Lands nor kill a musk-ox when he got there. He took their bets, which were large. And he went to the Barren Lands, armed only with his niblick and a camera. But he didn't kill a musk-ox. He said they came right up to be photographed, and he hadn't the heart to strike. He brought back plenty enough pictures to prove where he'd been, but no musk-ox. He aimed at one tentatively but at the last moment held his hand. 'He remembered suddenly,' he said, 'that he had never killed anything, and didn't propose to begin.' So he came home and paid one bet and pocketed the other. He can't shoot; he can't fish; he can't row. He's a perfect dub, but he's got the soul of a Columbus."

"Something tells me," said Pritchard, "that I shall like him."

Herring, having arrived and registered and been shown his rooms, was not thereafter seen to speak to anybody for two whole days. As a matter of fact, though, he held some conversation with Renier, whom he had met before.

"It's just Boston," Renier explained. "They're the best people in the world—when—well, not when you get to know them but when they get to know you. Give him time and he will blossom."

"He looks like a blossom already," said Lee. "He looks at a little distance like a gigantic plant of scarlet salvia, or a small maple-tree in October."

Upon the third day Mr. Herring came out of his shell, as had been prophesied. He went about asking guests and guides, with almost plaintive seriousness, questions which they were unable to answer. He began to make friends with Pritchard and Langham. He solemnly presented Arthur with a baseball that had figured in a Yale-Harvard game. Then he got himself introduced to Lee.

"You guide, don't you?" he said.

"I have guided," she said, "but I don't. It was only in the beginning of things when there weren't enough real guides to go around. But, surely you don't need a guide. You've been to the Barren Lands and all sorts of wild places. You ought to be a first-class woodsman."

"I thought I'd like to go fishing to-morrow," he said. "It's very disappointing. I've looked forward all my life to being guided by a young girl, and when I saw you, I said, if this isn't she, this is her living image."

"You shall have Bullard," said Lee. "He knows all the best places."

Herring complained to Arthur. "Your sisters," he said, "are said to be the best guides in the Adirondacks, but they won't take me out. How is a fellow to convalesce from typhoid if people aren't unfailingly kind to him?"

Arthur laughed, and said that he didn't know.

"Let me guide you," he offered.

"No," said Herring, "it isn't that I want to be guided. It's that I want the experience of being guided by a girl. I want to lean back and be rowed."

Herring walked in the woods and came upon Phyllis's garden, with Phyllis in the midst of it.

"Halloo again!" he said.

Now it so happened that he had never seen Phyllis before.

She straightened from a frame of baby lettuce and smiled. She loved bright colors, and his flaming hair was becoming to her garden.

"Halloo again!" she said.

"Have you changed your mind?" he asked.

She sparred for time and enlightenment and said:

"It's against all the rules."

"We could," said he, "start so early that nobody would know. I have often gotten up at five."

"So have I," said Phyllis wistfully.

"We could be back before breakfast."

Phyllis appeared to think the matter over.

"Of course," he said, "you said you wouldn't. But if girls didn't change their minds, they wouldn't be girls."

"That," said Phyllis, "is perfectly true."

To herself she said:

"He's asked Lee or Gay to guide him, and thinks he's asked me."

Now, Phyllis was not good with oars or fishing-tackle, but she liked Herring's hair and the fact that he never smiled. Furthermore, she believed that, if the worst came to the worst, she could find some of the places where people sometimes took trout.

"I have never," said Herring, "been guided by a young girl."

"What, never!" exclaimed Phyllis.

"Never," he said. "And I am sure that it would work wonders for me."

"Such as?"

"It might lead me to take an interest in gardening. I have always hoped that I should some day."

"People," thought Phyllis, "interested in gardening are rare—especially beautiful young gentlemen with flaming hair. Here is my chance to slaughter two birds with one stone."

"You'll swear not to tell?" she exhorted.

"Yes," he said, "but not here. Soon. When I am alone." He did not smile.

"Then," she said, "be at the float at five-thirty sharp."

That night she sought out Lee and Gay.

"Such a joke," she said. "I've promised to guide Mr. Herring—to-morrow at five-thirty, but he thinks that it's one of you two who has promised. Now, as I don't row or fish, one of you will have to take my place for the credit of the family."

But her sisters were laughing in their sleeves.

"My dear girl," said Gay, "why the dickens didn't you tell us sooner? We also have made positive engagements at five-thirty to-morrow morning."

"What engagements?" exclaimed Phyllis.

Gay leaned close and whispered confidentially.

"We've made positive engagements," she said, "to sleep till breakfast time."

[XIII]

In an athletic generation Phyllis was an anachronism. She was the sort of girl one's great-grandmother was, only better-looking—one's great-grandmother, if there is any truth in oil and canvas, having been neatly and roundly turned out of a peg of wood. Phyllis played no game well, unless gardening is a game. She liked to embroider and to write long letters in a wonderfully neat hand. She disliked intensely the roaring of firearms and the diabolic flopping of fresh-caught fish. She was one of those people who never look at a sunset or a moonrise or a flower without actually seeing them, and yet, withal, her sisters Lee and Gay looked upon her with a certain awe and respect. She was so strong in the wrists and fingers that she could hold them when they were rambunctious. And she was only afraid of things that aren't in the least dangerous. "No," they said, "she can't fish and shoot and row and play tennis and dive and swim under water, but she's the best dancer in the family—probably in the world—and the best sport."

Phyllis was, in truth, a good sport, or else she was more attracted by Mr. Herring's Salvia-splendens hair than she would have cared to admit. Whatever the cause, she met him at the float the next morning at five-thirty, prepared to guide him or perish in the attempt. She wore a short blue skirt and a long white sweater of Shetland wool. It weighed about an ounce. She wore white tennis shoes and an immense pair of well-oiled gardening gloves. At least she would put off blistering her hands as long as possible.

Phyllis, to be exact, was five minutes early for her appointment. This gave her time to get a boat into the water without displaying awkwardness to any one but herself—also, to slip the oars over the thole-pins and to accustom herself to the idea of handling them. She had taken coaching the night before from Lee and Gay, sitting on a bearskin rug in front of the fire, and swaying rhythmically forward and back.

As Herring was no fisherman, her sisters advised her to row very slowly. "Tell him," they said, "that a boat rushing through water alarms fish more than anything in the world."

She told him when he was seated in the stern of the boat facing her.

"You mustn't mind going very slow," she said. "The fish in this part of the Adirondacks are noted for their sensitiveness in general and their acute sense of hearing in particular. Why, if I were to row as fast as I can"—there must have been a twinkle in her eyes—"trout miles away would be frightened out of their skins," and she added mentally, "and I should upset this horribly wabbly boat into the bargain."

They proceeded at a snail's pace, Phyllis dabbing the water gingerly with her oars, with something of that caution and repulsion with which one turns over a dead snake with a stick—to see if it is dead.

The grips of guide-boat oars overlap. And your hands follow rather than accompany each other from catch to finish, and from finish to catch. If you are careless, or not to the stroke born or trained, you occasionally knock little chunks of skin and flesh from your knuckles.

Herring watched Phyllis's gentle and restrained efforts with inscrutable eyes.

"I never could understand," he said, "how you fellows manage to row at all with that sort of an outfit. At Harvard they only give you one oar and let you take both hands to it, and then you can't row. At least, I couldn't. They put me right out of the boat. They said I caught crabs. As a matter of fact, I didn't. All I did was to sit there, and every now and then the handle of my oar banged me across the solar plexus."

"We're not going far, you know," said Phyllis (and she mastered the desire to laugh). "Hadn't you—ah—um—better put your rod together?"

"Oh, I can do that!" said Herring. "You begin with the big piece and you stick the next-sized piece into that, and so on. And I know how to put the reel on, because the man in the store showed me, and I know how to run the line through the rings."

"Well," said Phyllis, "that's more than half the battle."

"And," Herring continued, "he showed me how to tie on the what-you-may-call-it and the flies."

"Good!" said Phyllis.

"And, of course," he concluded, "I've forgotten."

Now, Phyllis had been shown how to tie flies to a leader only the night before, and she, also, had forgotten.

"There are," she said, "a great many fetiches among anglers. Among them are knots. Now, in my experience, almost any knot that will stand will do. The important thing is to choose the right flies."

As to this, she had also received instruction, but with better results, since it was an entirely feminine affair of colored silks and feathers.

"I will tell you which flies to use," she said.

"And," said he, "you will also have to show me how to cast."

"What!" she exclaimed, and stopped rowing, "You don't know how to cast?"

"No," he said, "I don't. I'm a dub. Didn't you know that?"

"But," she protested, "I can't teach you in a morning"—and she added mentally—"or in a whole lifetime, for that matter."

It was not more than a mile across the mouth of a deep bay to the brook in which they had elected to fish. With no wind to object, the most dabbily propelled guide boat travels with considerable speed, and before Herring had managed to tie the flies which Phyllis had selected to his leader (with any kind of a knot) they were among the snaggy shallows of the brook's mouth.

The brook was known locally as Swamp Brook, its shores for a mile or more being boggy and treacherous. Fishermen who liked to land occasionally and cast from terra firma avoided it. Phyllis had selected it solely because it was the nearest brook to the camp which contained trout. If she had remembered how full it was of snags, and how easily guide boats are turned turtle, she would have selected some other brook, even, if necessary, at the "Back of beyond." It had been easy enough to propel the boat across the open waters of the lake, but to guide it clear of snags and around right-angle bends, especially when the genius of rowing demands that eyes look astern rather than ahead, was beyond her powers. The boat ran into snags, poked its nose into boggy banks, turned half over, righted, rushed on, and stopped again with rude bumps.

Herring, that fatalistic young Bostonian, began to take an interest in his fate. His flies trailed in the water behind him. His eyes never left Phyllis's face. His handsome mouth was as near to smiling as it ever got.

"Do you," he said presently, "swim as well as you row?"

She stopped rowing; she laughed right out.

"Just about," she said.

"Good," he said seriously, "because I'm a dub at it, and in case of an upset, I look to you."

"The truth," said Phyllis, "is that there's no place to swim to. It's all swamp in here."

"True," said Herring; "we would have to cling to the boat and call upon Heaven to aid us."

One of Herring's flies, trailing in the water, proved, at this moment, overwhelmingly attractive to a young and unsophisticated trout.

Herring shouted with the triumph of a schoolboy, "I've got one," and sprang to his feet.

"Please sit down!" said Phyllis. "We almost went that time."

"So we did," said Herring.

He sat down, and they almost "went" again.

"Now," said Phyllis, "play him."

"Play him?" said Herring. "Watch me." And he began to pull strongly upon the fish.

The fish was young and weak. Herring's tackle was new and strong. The fish dangled in mid-air over the middle of the boat.

"Sorry," said Herring, "I can't reach him. Take him off, please."

It has been said that Phyllis was a good sport. If there was one thing she hated and feared more than another, it was a live fish. She reached forward; her gloved hand almost closed upon it; it gave a convulsive flop; Phyllis squeaked like a mouse, threw her weight to one side, and the boat quietly upset.

The sportsmen came to the surface streaming.

"I can touch bottom," said Herring politely; "can you?"

"Yes," she said, "but my feet are sinking into it—" She tore them loose and swam. Herring did likewise. And they clung to the boat.

"I hope you'll forgive me," said Phyllis. "I never rowed a boat before and I never could stand live fish."

"It was my fault," said Herring. "Something told me to lean the opposite from the way you leaned. But it told me too late. The truth is I don't know how to behave in a boat. Well, you are still guide. It's up to you."

"What is up to me?"

"A plan of some sort," said he, "to get us out of this."

"Oh, no," she said, "it's up to you."

"My plan," he said, "would be to get back into the boat and row home. It seems feasible, and even easy. But appearances are deceptive. I think I'd rather walk. What has happened here might happen out on the middle of the lake."

"What you don't realize," said Phyllis, "is that we're in the midst of an impassable swamp."

"Impassable?"

"Well, no one's ever crossed it except in winter."

"What—no one!"

He was immensely interested.

"Do you know," he went on confidentially, "the only things that I'm good at are things for which there are no precedents—things that nobody has ever done before. That's why I'm so fond of doing unusual things. Now, you say that this swamp has never been crossed? Enough said. You and I will cross it. We will do it. Are you game?"

"It seems," said Phyllis, "merely a question of when and where we drown. So I'm game. Your teeth are chattering."

"Thank you," said Herring. "But no harm will come to them. They are very strong."

"I hope," said Phyllis, "that when I come out of the water you won't look at me. I shall be a sight."

"A comrade in trouble," said Herring, "is never a sight."

"I am so ashamed," said Phyllis.

"What of?"

"Of being such a fool."

"You're a good sport," said Herring. "That's what you are."

By dint of violent kicking and paddling with their free hands they managed to propel the guide boat from the centre of the brook to a firm-looking clump of reeds and alder roots which formed a tiny peninsula from that shore which was toward The Camp. Covered with slime and mud they dragged themselves out of the water and stood balancing upon the alder roots to recover their breath.

"We must each take an oar," said Herring. "We can make little bridges with them. And we must keep working hard so as to get warm. We shall live to write a brochure about this: 'From Clump to Clump, or Mudfoots in the Adirondacks.'"

Between that clump on which they had found a footing and the next was ten feet of water.

Herring crossed seven feet of it with one heavy jump, fell on his face, caught two handfuls of viburnum stems, and once more dragged himself out of water.

"Now then," he called, "float the oars over to me." And when Phyllis had done this: "Now you come. The main thing in crossing swamps is to keep flat instead of up and down. Jump for it—fall forward—and I'll get your hands!"

Once more they stood side by side precariously balancing.

"The moment," said Herring, "that you begin to feel bored, tell me."

"Why?"

"So that I can encourage you. I will tell you that you are doing something that has never been done before. And that will make you feel fine and dandy. What we are doing is just as hard as finding the North Pole, only there isn't going to be so much of it. Now then, in negotiating this next sheet of water——"

And so they proceeded until the sun was high in the heavens and until it was low.

[XIV]

To attempt the dangerous passage of a swamp when they might have returned to camp in the guide boat was undoubtedly a most imbecile decision. And if Phyllis had not been thoroughly flustered by the upset, which was all her fault, she never would have consented to it. As for Herring's voice in the matter, it was that which the young man always gave when there was a question of adventure. He didn't get around mountains by the valley road. He climbed over them. He had not in his whole being a suspicion of what is dangerous. He had never been afraid of anything. He probably never would be. He would have enjoyed leading half a dozen forlorn hopes every morning before breakfast.

"We were idiots," said Phyllis, "to leave the boat."

"We can't go back to it now," said Herring. "We don't know the way."

"Your voice sounds as if you were glad of it."

"I am. I was dreadfully afraid you'd decide against crossing this swamp. I'd set my heart on it."

"It isn't I," said Phyllis, "that's against our crossing this swamp. It's the swamp."

"The main thing," said Herring, with satisfaction (physically he was almost exhausted), "is that here we are safe and sound. We don't know where 'here' is, but it's with us, it won't run away. When we've rested we shall go on, taking 'here' with us. Wherever we go is 'here.' Think of that!"

"I wish I could think of something else," said Phyllis, "but I can't. I'm almost dead."

"You are doing something that no girl has ever done before, not even your sisters, those princesses of fortune. Years from now, when you begin, 'Once when I happened to be crossing the Swamp with a young fellow named Herring—' they will have to sit silent and listen."

"If you weren't so cheerful," said Phyllis, "I should have begun to cry an hour ago. Do you really think this is fun?"

"Do I think it's fun? To be in a scrape—not to know when or how we are going to get out of it? You bet I think it's fun."

"People have died," said Phyllis, "having just this sort of fun. Suppose we can't get out?"

"You mean to-day? Perhaps we can't. Perhaps not to-morrow. Perhaps we shall have to learn how to live in a swamp. A month of the life we've led for the last few hours might turn us into amphibians. That would be intensely novel and interesting. But, of course, when winter comes and the place freezes over we can march right out and take up our orthodox lives where we left off. Listen!"

"What?"

"I think I hear webs growing between my fingers and toes."

Phyllis laughed so that the partially dried mud on her face cracked.

"What," she said, "are we going to eat this side of winter? What are we going to eat now?"

His face expressed immense concern.

"What? You are hungry? Allow me!"

He produced from his inside pocket a very large cake of sweet chocolate, wrapped in several thicknesses of oiled silk.

"My one contribution," he said, "to the science of woodcraft."

Phyllis ate and was refreshed. Afterward she washed all the mud from her face. Herring watched the progress of the ablution with much interest.

"Wonderful!" he said presently.

"What is wonderful?" she asked, not without anticipation of a compliment.

"Wonderful to find that something which is generally accepted as true—is true. To see it proved before your eyes."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean," he said, "that I never before actually saw a girl wash her face. I've seen 'em when they said they were going to. I've seen 'em when they said they just had. But now I know."

"If you weren't quite mad," said Phyllis, "you'd be very exasperating. Here am I, frightened half to death, cold and miserable, and dreadfully worried to think how worried my family must be, and there are you, almost too tired to stand, actually delighted with yourself, because you're in trouble and because for the first time in your life you've seen a girl wash her face. Can't you be serious about anything?"

"Not about a half-drowned girl taking the trouble to wash her face," he said.

"You," said she, "would look much better if you washed yours."

"But," he said, "we'll be covered with mud again before we've gone fifty yards."

"Because you are going into a coal mine to-morrow," said Phyllis, "is no reason why you shouldn't be clean to-day."

"True," said Herring, and he washed his face.

At breakfast that morning Pritchard received the following cablegram:

Come home and shake hands. I'm off. M.

Greatly moved, he carried it to Gay, and without comment put it in her hand.

"Who is M?" she asked.

"My uncle, the Earl of Merrivale."

"What does I'm off mean?"

"It means," said Pritchard, "that they've given him up, and he wants to make friends. He never liked my father or me."

"It means," said Gay generously, "that you are going away?"

"Yes," he said, "at once. But it means more. It means that I've got to find out if I'm—to come back some time?"

"Of course, you are to come back," she said.

Words rose swiftly to Pritchard's lips and came no further. Indeed, he appeared to swallow them.

"And I'm glad you are going to make friends with your uncle," said Gay.

"There'll be such lots of young men here when the season opens," said Pritchard.

"Judging by applications," said Gay, "we shall be swamped with gentlemen of all ages."

Pritchard's melancholy only deepened. "Will you come as far as Carrytown in the Streak?" he asked.

She nodded, and said she would because she had some shopping to do.

During that short, exhilarating rush across the lake, and afterward walking up and down on the board platform by the side of the waiting train, he tried his best to ring a little sentiment out of her, but failed utterly.

The locomotive whistled, and the conductor came out of the village drug-store, staggering slightly.

"I've left all my dry-fly tackle," said Pritchard. "Will you take care of it for me?"

"With pleasure," said Gay.

"I'd like you to use it. It's a lovely rod to throw line."

"All aboard!"

"I'd like to bring you out some rods and things. May I?"

"You bet you may!" exclaimed Gay.

Pritchard sighed. The train creaked, jolted, moved forward, stopped, jerked, and moved forward again. Pritchard waited until the rear steps of the rear car were about to pass.

"Good-by, Miss Gay!"

They shook hands firmly, and Pritchard swung himself onto the moving train. Gay, walking rapidly and presently breaking into a trot, accompanied him as far as the end of the platform. She wanted to say something that would please him very much without encouraging him too much.

"Looks as if I was after you!" she said.

Pritchard's whole soul was in his eyes. And there was a large lump in his throat. Suddenly Gay reached the end of the long platform and stopped running. The train was now going quite fast for an Adirondack train. The distance between them widened rapidly.

"Wish you weren't going," called Gay.

And she saw Pritchard reach suddenly upward and pull the rope by which trains are stopped in emergencies. While the train was stopping and the train hands were trying to find out who had stopped it and why, Pritchard calmly alighted, and returned to where Gay was standing.

"I just had to look at you once more—close," he said; "you never can tell what will happen in this world. I may never see you again, and the thought is killing me. Think of that once in a while, please."

He bent swiftly, caught her hand in his, kissed it, and was gone. Or, if not exactly gone, she saw him no more, because of suddenly blinding tears.

When she reached The Camp, Arthur was at the float to meet her.

"Phyllis and Herring haven't come back," he said. "Lee says they went fishing. Do you know where they went?"

THE SEVEN DARLINGS

THE

SEVEN DARLINGS

By Gouverneur Morris

With Frontispiece

By HOWARD CHANDLER CHRISTY

A. L. BURT COMPANY

Publishers

New York

Published by Arrangements with Charles Scribner's Sons

Copyright, 1915, by

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

TO

HOPE DAVIS

CONTENTS