The tragic necessity for occupation, for interesting herself in something sufficient to take her out of herself, she now understood, and the deep longing for the love of all she had of kith and kin was steadily tightening its grip on her, increasing day by day.  Nothing else could take its place; she began to understand that; not her intimacy with Kathleen, not even her love for Duane.  Outside of these there existed a zone of loneliness in which she was doomed to wander, a zone peopled only by the phantoms of the parents she had never known long enough to remember—­a dreaded zone of solitude and desolation and peril for her.  The danger line marked its boundary; beyond lay folly and destruction.

Little by little Scott began to notice that his sister evidently found his company desirable, that she followed him about, watching his so-called scientific pursuits with a curiosity too constant to be assumed.  And it pleased him immensely; and at times he held forth to her and instructed her with brotherly condescension.

He noticed, too, that her spirits did not appear to be particularly lively; there were often long intervals of silence when, together by the window in the library where he was fussing over his “Life History,” she never spoke, never even moved from her characteristic attitude—­seated deep in a leather chair, arms resting on the padded chair-arms, ankles crossed, and her head a trifle lowered, as though absorbed in studying the Herati design on a Persian rug.

Once, looking up suddenly, he surprised her brown eyes full of tears.

“Hello!” he said, amazed; “what’s the row, Sis?”

But she only laughed and dried her eyes, denying that there was any explanation except that girls were sometimes that way for no reason at all.

One day he asked Kathleen privately about this, but she merely confirmed Geraldine’s diagnosis of the phenomenon: 

“Tears come into girls’ eyes,” she said, “and there isn’t anybody on earth who can tell a man why, and he wouldn’t comprehend it if anybody did tell him.”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said sceptically; “if Rose-beetles shed tears, I’d never rest until I found out why.  You bet there’s always a reason that starts anything and always somebody to find it out and tell another fellow who can understand it!”

With which brilliant burst of higher philosophy they went out into the October woods together to hunt for cocoons.

Geraldine, rather flushed and nervous, met them at Hurryon Gate, carrying a rifle and wearing the shortest skirts her brother had ever beheld.  The symmetry of her legs moved him to reproof: 

“I thought people looked that way only in tailor’s fashion plates,” he said.  “What are you after—­chipmunks?”

“Not at all,” said his sister.  “Do you know what happened to me an hour ago?  I was paddling your canoe into the Hurryon Inlet, and I suppose I made no noise in disembarking, and I came right on a baby wild boar in the junipers.  It was a tiny thing, not eighteen inches long, Kathleen, and so cunning and furry and yellowish, with brown stripes on its back, that I tried to catch it—­just to hug it.”