when he told it, which made Miss Lamont blush, and appear what the artist had described her to King—­the sweetest thing in life.  Mrs. Benson beamed with motherly content, and was quite as tearful as ungrammatical, but her mind was practical and forecasting.  “There’ll have to be,” she confided to Miss Lamont, “more curtains in the parlor, and I don’t know but new paper.”  Mr. Meigs was not present.  Mrs. Farquhar noticed this, and Mrs. Benson remembered that he had said something about going down to North Conway, which gave King an opportunity to say to Mrs. Farquhar that she ought not to despair, for Mr. Meigs evidently moved in a circle, and was certain to cross her path again.  “I trust so,” she replied.  “I’ve been his only friend through all this miserable business.”  The dinner was not a great success.  There was too much self-consciousness all round, and nobody was witty and brilliant.

The next morning King took Irene to the Crystal Cascade.  When he used to frequent this pretty spot as a college boy, it had seemed to him the ideal place for a love scene-much better than the steps of a hotel.  He said as much when they were seated at the foot of the fall.  It is a charming cascade fed by the water that comes down Tuckerman’s Ravine.  But more beautiful than the fall is the stream itself, foaming down through the bowlders, or lying in deep limpid pools which reflect the sky and the forest.  The water is as cold as ice and as clear as cut glass; few mountain streams in the world, probably, are so absolutely without color.  “I followed it up once,” King was saying, by way of filling in the pauses with personal revelations, “to the source.  The woods on the side are dense and impenetrable, and the only way was to keep in the stream and climb over the bowlders.  There are innumerable slides and cascades and pretty falls, and a thousand beauties and surprises.  I finally came to a marsh, a thicket of alders, and around this the mountain closed in an amphitheatre of naked perpendicular rock a thousand feet high.  I made my way along the stream through the thicket till I came to a great bank and arch of snow—­it was the last of July—­from under which the stream flowed.  Water dripped in many little rivulets down the face of the precipices—­after a rain there are said to be a thousand cascades there.  I determined to climb to the summit, and go back by the Tip-top House.  It does not look so from a little distance, but there is a rough, zigzag sort of path on one side of the amphitheatre, and I found this, and scrambled up.  When I reached the top the sun was shining, and although there was nothing around me but piles of granite rocks, without any sign of a path, I knew that I had my bearings so that I could either reach the house or a path leading to it.  I stretched myself out to rest a few moments, and suddenly the scene was completely shut in by a fog. [Irene put out her hand and touched King’s.] I couldn’t tell where the sun was, or in what direction the hut lay, and the danger was that I would wander off on a spur, as the lost usually do.  But I knew where the ravine was, for I was still on the edge of it.”