“What have I ever done——­”

“Exactly what you’re doing now to Rosalie—­what you did to a dozen women this winter—­what you did to me”—­she turned and looked at him—­“the first time I ever set eyes on you since we were children together.  I know you are not to be taken seriously; almost everybody knows that!  And all the same, Duane, I’ve thought about you a lot in these two months up here, and—­I’m happy that you’ve come at last....  You won’t mistake me and try to be sentimental with me, will you?”

She laid her slim, sun-tanned hand on his arm; they walked on together through the woodland where green bramble sprays glimmered through clustering tree trunks and the fading light turned foliage and undergrowth to that vivid emerald which heralds dusk.

“Duane,” she said, “I’m dreadfully restless and I cannot account for it....  Perhaps motherless girls are never quite normal; I don’t know.  But, lately, the world has seemed very big and threatening around me....  Scott is nice to me, usually; Kathleen adorable....  I—­I don’t know what I want, what it is I miss.”

Her hand still rested lightly on his arm as they walked forward.  She was speaking at intervals almost as though talking in an undertone to herself: 

“I’m in—­perplexity.  I’ve been troubled.  Perhaps that is what makes me tolerant of you; perhaps that’s why I’m glad to see you....  Trouble is a new thing to me.  I thought I had troubles—­perhaps I had as a child.  But this is deeper, different, disquieting.”

“Are you in love?” he asked.

“No.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Then what——­”

“I can’t tell you.  Anyway, it won’t last.  It can’t, ...  Can it?”

She looked around at him, and they both laughed a little at her inconsequence.

“I feel better for pretending to tell you, anyway,” she said, as they halted before high iron gates hung between two granite posts from which the woven wire fence of the game park, ten feet high, stretched away into the darkening woods on either hand.

“This is the Sachem’s Gate,” she said; “here is the key; unlock it, please.”

Inside they crossed a stream dashing between tanks set with fern and tall silver birches.

“Hurryon Brook,” she said.  “Isn’t it a beauty?  It pours into the Gray Water a little farther ahead.  We must hasten, or it will be too dark to see the trout.”

Twice again they crossed the rushing brook on log bridges.  Then through the trees stretching out before them they caught sight of the Gray Water, crinkling like a flattened sheet of hammered silver.

Everywhere the surface was starred and ringed and spattered by the jumping fish; and now they could hear them far out, splash! slap! clip-clap! splash!—­hundreds and hundreds jumping incessantly, so that the surface of the water was constantly broken over the entire expanse.

Now and then some great trout, dark against the glimmer, leaped full length into the air; everywhere fish broke, swirled, or rolled over, showing “colour.”