“There is Scott,” she whispered, attuning her voice to the forest quiet—­“out there in that canoe.  No, he hasn’t taken his rod; he seldom does; he’s perfectly crazy over things of this sort.  All day and half the night he’s out prowling about the woods, not fishing, not shooting, just mousing around and listening and looking.  And for all his dreadfully expensive collection of arms and rods, he uses them very little.  See him out there drifting about with the fish breaking all around—­some within a foot of his canoe!  He’ll never come in to dress for dinner unless we call him.”

And she framed her mouth with both hands and sent a long, clear call floating out across the Gray Water.

“All right; I’ll come!” shouted her brother.  “Wait a moment!”

They waited many moments.  Dusk, lurking in the forest, peered out, casting a gray net over shore and water.  A star quivered, another, then ten, and scores and myriads.

They had found a seat on a fallen log; neither seemed to have very much to say.  For a while the steady splashing of the fish sounded like the uninterrupted music of a distant woodland waterfall.  Suddenly it ceased as if by magic.  Not another trout rose; the quiet was absolute.

“Is not this stillness delicious?” she breathed.

“It is sweeter when you break it.”

“Please don’t say such things.... Can’t you understand how much I want you to be sincere to me?  Lately, I don’t know why, I’ve seemed to feel so isolated.  When you talk that way I feel more so.  I—­just want—­a friend.”

There was a silence; then he said lightly: 

“I’ve felt that way myself.  The more friends I make the more solitary I seem to be.  Some people are fashioned for a self-imprisonment from which they can’t break out, and through which no one can penetrate.  But I never thought of you as one of those.”

“I seem to be at times—­not exactly isolated, but unable to get close to—­to Kathleen, for example.  Do you know, Duane, it might be very good for me to have you to talk to.”

“People usually like to talk to me.  I’ve noticed it.  But the curious part of it is that they have nothing to give me in exchange for my attention.”

“What do you mean?”

He laughed.  “Oh, nothing.  I amuse people; I know it.  You—­and everybody—­say I am all cleverness and froth—­not to be taken seriously.  But did it ever occur to you that what you see in me you evoke.  Shallowness provokes shallowness, levity, lightness, inconsequence—­all are answered by their own echo....  And you and the others think it is I who answer.”

He laughed, not looking at her: 

“And it happens that you—­and the others—­are mistaken.  If I appear to be what you say I am, it is merely a form of self-defence.  Do you think I could endure the empty nonsense of a New York winter if I did not present to it a surface like a sounding-board and let Folly converse with its own echo—­while, behind it, underneath it, Duane Mallett goes about his own business.”