“Max, why not do what Mr. Ferry proposed, if you think the house can’t be lived in?  Put up a tent in the grove and bring Sally there as soon as she’s fit for it.  She’d get strong twice as fast as in that stuffy flat!”

Max gazed at her.  “That’s just what you get,” he ejaculated, “when you try to talk business with a girl.  Show her a good and sufficient reason why you can’t do a thing, and she instantly asks why you can’t do something ten times harder.  Will you tell me how, with Sally out here in a tent, we fellows are going to get along in the flat?  And what would she do out here, all by herself?”

It was now Josephine’s turn to gaze with scorn at her companion.  “Do you think I’m proposing for Sally to camp by herself out here, while Mary Ann Flinders keeps house for you in town?  No; bring Mary Ann out here to cook for Sally, and you boys come out for the nights.  If you had a bit of camp spirit, you’d jump at the chance to get a real outing right along with your work.”

“Camp,” exclaimed Max, “in your own front yard!”

“The pine grove isn’t your front yard, and the farther end of it is so far away from the road, nobody could tell who was who, back there.  Besides, what difference, if Sally gets strong again as fast as out-door life can make her?”

“It’s not practical,” Max continued to object, and Josephine realized afresh that the Lane temperament was not one easily swayed by argument or appeal.  There was a stubborn streak in Max which was as hard to deal with now as it had been in the days when Josephine had fought it out with him in playground affairs.  Yet she did not lose hope.  She had known Max to come round, if left to himself, convinced in the end by logic derived from his own consideration of the case.  If he could once see a course as fair and right he would accept it.  Clearly, he did not yet see this thing in any such light, and it was of no use to persist in heated argument which would only result in prejudicing him yet further against the plan which seemed to Josephine so wise a one.

The two walked through the timber tract, Max pointing out trees which he thought could be sacrificed with a real gain to the timber to be left standing.  Josephine listened and agreed, finding genuine interest in the long vistas of oak and chestnut pillars stretching away to what seemed an infinite distance, for dense undergrowth at the back of the wood prevented the appearance of an outlet anywhere.

As they drove away, they noted with new interest the small white cottage on the farther side of the dividing hedge.

“There’s your friend Ferry,” observed Max, as they flew by at the gray mare’s smartest pace, “working away in a strawberry patch as if his life depended on it.  That’s where he gets his beautiful Indian complexion you admire so much, when he isn’t doing engineering stunts.  Probably he’s home just now between jobs, fixing up his mother in her new place.  Well, we can’t all grow strawberries and lie round on our backs reading hydraulics.  Some of us have to do the in-door jobs.  Of course those are useless—­mere folly.  All the really sensible chaps are looking after the colour of their skins!”