“Gordon,” he said, surprised, “I didn’t suppose you were liberal.”

“Liberal!  Why, man alive!  Do you think a fellow can live out of doors as I have lived, and see germs sprout, and see mountain ranges decay, and sit on a few glaciers, and swing a pick into a mother-lode—­and not be liberal?  Do you suppose ten-cent laws bother me when I’m up against the blind laws that made the law-makers?—­laws that made life itself before Christ lived to conform to them?...  I married where I loved.  It chanced that my marriage with your sister didn’t clash with the sanctified order of things in Manhattan town.  But if your sister had been the maid who dresses her, and I had loved her, I’d have married her all the same and have gone about the pleasures and duties of procreation and conservation exactly as I go about ’em now....  I wonder how much the Almighty was thinking about Tenth Street when the first pair of anthropoids mated? Nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus.  If you love each other—­Noli pugnare duobus. ...  And I’m going into the woods to look for ginseng.  Want to come?”

Neville went.  Cameron and Stephanie, equipped with buckskin gloves, a fox terrier, and digging apparatus, joined them just where the slender meadow brook entered the woods.

“There are mosquitoes here!” exclaimed Cameron wrathfully.  “All day and every day I’m being stung down town, and I’m not going to stand for it here!”

Stephanie let him aid her to the top of a fallen log, glancing back once or twice toward Neville, who was sauntering forward among the trees, pretending to look for ginseng.

“Do you notice how Louis has changed?” she said, keeping her balance on the log.  “I cannot bear to see him so thin and colourless.”

Cameron now entertained a lively suspicion how matters stood, and knew that Stephanie also suspected; but he only said, carelessly:  “It’s probably dissipation.  You know what a terrible pace he’s been going from the cradle onward.”

She smiled quietly.  “Yes, I know, Sandy.  And I know, too, that you are the only man who has been able to keep up that devilish pace with him.”

“I’ve led a horrible life,” muttered Cameron darkly.

Stephanie laughed; he gave her his hand as she stood balanced on the big log; she laid her fingers in his confidently, looked into his honest face, still laughing, then sprang lightly to the ground.

“What a really good man you are!” she said tormentingly.

“Oh, heaven!  If you call me that I’m really done for!”

“Done for?” she exclaimed in surprise.  “How?”

“Done for as far as you are concerned.”

“I?  Why how, and with what am I concerned, Sandy?  I don’t understand you.”

But he only turned red and muttered to himself and strolled about with his hands in his pockets, kicking the dead leaves as though he expected to find something astonishing under them.  And Stephanie glanced at him sideways once or twice, thoughtfully, curiously, but questioned him no further.