“What else can you do?” asked Judith with a noticeable abatement of her previous disesteem.

Arnold hesitated, his own self-confidence as evidently dashed.  “Well—­I can fence a little—­and talk French; we are in Paris winters, you know.  We don’t stay in Lydford for the winter.  Nobody does.”

“Everybody goes away?” queried Judith.  “What a funny town!”

“Oh, except the people who live there—­the Vermonters.”

Judith was more and more at a loss.  “Don’t you live there?”

“No, we don’t live anywhere.  We just stay places for a while.  Nobody that we know lives anywhere.”  He interrupted a further question from the astonished Judith to ask, “How’d you happen to have such a dandy swimming-pool out of such a little brook?”

Judith, switched off upon a topic of recent and absorbing interest, was diverted from investigation into the odd ways of people who lived nowhere.  “Isn’t it great!” she said ardently.  “It’s new this summer—­that’s why I don’t swim so very well yet.  Why, it was this way.  The creek ran through a corner of our land, and a lot of Father’s students that are engineers or something, wanted to do something for Father when they graduated—­lots of students do, you know—­and everybody said the creek didn’t have water enough and they bet each other it did, and after Commencement we had a kind of camp for a week—­tents and things all round here—­and Mother cooked for them—­camp fires—­oh, lots of fun!—­and they let us children tag around as much as we pleased—­and they and Father dug, and fixed concrete—­say, did you ever get let to stir up concrete?  It’s great!”

Seeing in the boy’s face a blankness as great as her own during his chance revelations of life on another planet, she exclaimed, “Here, come on, down to the other end, and I’ll show you how they made the dam and all—­they began over there with—­” The two pattered along the edge hand-in-hand, talking incessantly on a common topic at last, interrupting each other, squatting down, peering into the water, pointing, discussing, arguing, squeezing the deliciously soft mud up and down between their toes, their heads close together—­they might for the moment have been brother and sister who had grown up together.

They were interrupted by voices, and turning flushed and candid faces of animation towards the path, beheld Aunt Victoria, wonderful and queen-like in a white dress, a parasol, like a great rose, over her stately blond head, attended by Sylvia adoring; Mrs. Marshall quiet and observant; Mr. Rollins, the tutor, thin, agitated, and unhappily responsible; and Professor Marshall smiling delightedly at the children.

“Why, Arnold Smith!” cried his tutor, too much overcome by the situation to express himself more forcibly than by a repetition of the boy’s name.  “Why, Arnold!  Come here!”

The cloud descended upon the boy’s face.  “I will not!” he said insolently.