“Thank you; it is such fun to throw stones in the water,” he replied, with elaborate politeness.

That Maurice was badly spoiled was no secret.  The only boy in the family, with bright, engaging ways when things went to please him, he had been petted and humored by his parents, given up to by Katherine, and treated as a leader by his boy friends, until he had come to look upon his own pleasure as the most important thing in the universe.  Not that he realized this.  He would have been greatly surprised to hear he was selfish.

The accident by which his knee had been sprained severely was an experience as trying as it was new to him.  At first the petting he received at home, and the attentions of his friends, added to his sense of importance and made it endurable, but this could not continue indefinitely.  Ball playing and other sports must go on, and Maurice, to his aggrieved surprise, found they could go on very well without him.

This morning his mother had expostulated mildly.  “My son, you ought not to make yourself so miserable.  You could not be more unhappy if you were to be lame always.”

“It is now I care about,” he replied petulantly.

“I don’t know what to do with Maurice,” he overheard her say to his father in the hall.

“Let him alone.  I am ashamed of him,” was Mr. Roberts’s reply.

And now, deserted and abused, Maurice was very miserable, and when he could stand it no longer he sought a distant spot in the garden and threw himself face down in the grass.

He had been lying here some time when a voice apparently quite near asked, “Have you hurt yourself?”

Lifting his flushed, unhappy face, he saw peeping at him through the hedge the girl Katherine had been so interested in on Sunday.  She, too, was lying on the grass, and her fair hair was spread out around her like a veil.  Maurice raised himself on his elbow and surveyed her in surprise, forgetting to reply.

“What is the matter?” she asked again, looking at him with a pair of serious gray eyes.

“Nothing,” he answered.

The gray eyes grew merry.  Rosalind laughed, as she said, “Then you ought not to groan.  I thought when I heard you, perhaps you had fallen from a tree.”

“I wasn’t groaning,” he protested, feeling ashamed.

“Maybe you call it sighing, but it was dreadfully deep.”

“Well, I think a fellow has a right to sigh when he can’t do anything or go anywhere; and everybody else is having a good time,” Maurice felt anxious to vindicate himself.

“I am not having a good time,” said Rosalind, “at least not very; but then you know if you stay in the Forest of Arden, something pleasant is bound to happen before long.”

Maurice stared at her blankly.

“Perhaps you don’t know the story,” Rosalind suggested.

“What story?”

“Its real name is ‘As You Like It,’ but I call it ’The Story of the Forest.’”