* * * * *

As I swam about in the brook, not over four feet deep, I sang and shouted.  I had never been so happy in my life....

I dried myself in the sun, using its morning heat for a towel....

As I sat there on a rock, I heard a crackling of twigs, and Penton thrust his way through the intervening branches to my bare rock and my bare self ...  I hastily, I do not know why, put on my bathrobe....

“Hello, Penton.”

“Good morning, Johnnie.  I felt you’d be down here for your morning bath ...  I came to have a serious talk with you.”

“Yes?”

“I want you to take calmly what I am about to say!”

Penton was much impressed with my stories of tramp days and tales of adventure on land and sea, which you may be sure my sense of the dramatic had encouraged me to lay on thick—­and he, plainly, did not desire any heat in the discussion which was to follow....

“Recently it has come to my attention that there has been a lot of gossip about you and Hildreth ... your conduct together.”  He drew his lips together tightly, settled himself for a long siege....

“Why, Penton,” I began, protestingly and hypocritically,—­I had planned far other and franker conduct in such an emergency—­but here I was, deprecating the truth—­

“Why, Penton, God knows—­”

“Never mind ... if it is true, I am very sorry for you—­for Hildreth’s sake, for yours, for mine ... but I want to warn you, if it is not true, to look out ... you, as a friend, owe me some obligations ...  I have taken you in here, accepted you as one almost of my family, and—­”

“But, Penton, this is unfair,” I lied, “unfair even to suspect me—­”

“If it had been anybody but you, Johnnie, I would have been suspicious weeks ago ...  Oh, I know, Hildreth ... she is giving all the manifestations ... how her face shines, how beautiful she has grown, as she does, with a new heart interest!... and her taking my little cottage ... ousting me from it....

“If it was anyone else,” and he fetched a deep sigh, with tears standing in his eyes, leaving the sentence incomplete.

At that moment I was impelled almost to cast myself at his feet, to confess, and beg forgiveness....

“I want to warn you,” he went on, “of Hildreth ... once before this has happened ... she is a varietist by nature, as I am essentially a monogamist.”

“—­and the free love idea, it was you who taught her this, brought her into contact with Havelock Ellis, Ellen Key, Rosa Von Mayerreder?”

“I deny that.  I believe in human freedom ... divorce ... remarriage ... but not in extreme sex-radicalism ...  Hildreth has misinterpreted me ... the people you mention are great idealists, but in many ways they go too far ... true—­I brought Hildreth into contact with these books; but only that she might use her own judgment, not accept them wholly and blindly, as she has done....”