When Mr. King met the party at the dinner-table, the places of Miss Lamont and Mr. Forbes were still vacant.  The other ladies looked significantly at them, and one of them said, “Don’t you think there’s something in it? don’t you think they are interested in each other?” Mr. King put down his soup-spoon, too much amazed to reply.  Do women never think of anything but mating people who happen to be thrown together?  Here were this young lady and his friend, who had known each other for three days, perhaps, in the most casual way, and her friends had her already as good as married to him and off on a wedding journey.  All that Mr. King said, after apparent deep cogitation, was, “I suppose if it were here it would have to be in a traveling-dress,” which the women thought frivolous.

Yet it was undeniable that the artist and Marion had a common taste for hunting out picturesque places in the wood-paths, among the rocks, and on the edges of precipices, and they dragged the rest of the party many a mile through wildernesses of beauty.  Sketching was the object of all these expeditions, but it always happened—­there seemed a fatality in it that whenever they halted anywhere for a rest or a view, the Lamont girl was sure to take an artistic pose, which the artist couldn’t resist, and his whole occupation seemed to be drawing her, with the Catskills for a background.  “There,” he would say, “stay just as you are; yes, leaning a little so”—­it was wonderful how the lithe figure adapted itself to any background—­“and turn your head this way, looking at me.”  The artist began to draw, and every time he gave a quick glance upwards from his book, there were the wistful face and those eyes.  “Confound it!  I beg your pardon-the light.  Will you please turn your eyes a little off, that way-so.”  There was no reason why the artist should be nervous, the face was perfectly demure; but the fact is that art will have only one mistress.  So the drawing limped on from day to day, and the excursions became a matter of course.  Sometimes the party drove, extending their explorations miles among the hills, exhilarated by the sparkling air, excited by the succession of lovely changing prospects, bestowing their compassion upon the summer boarders in the smartly painted boarding-houses, and comparing the other big hotels with their own.  They couldn’t help looking down on the summer boarders, any more than cottagers at other places can help a feeling of superiority to people in hotels.  It is a natural desire to make an aristocratic line somewhere.  Of course they saw the Kaaterskill Falls, and bought twenty-five cents’ worth of water to pour over them, and they came very near seeing the Haines Falls, but were a little too late.

“Have the falls been taken in today?” asked Marion, seriously.

“I’m real sorry, miss,” said the proprietor, “but there’s just been a party here and taken the water.  But you can go down and look if you want to, and it won’t cost you a cent.”