“I don’t,” said the girl, with a passionate regret in her voice.  “It would be heavenly here with—­But you—­no, you’re different.  You always want to share your happiness.”

“I shouldn’t call that happiness.  But don’t you?” asked Mavering.

“No.  I’m selfish.”

“You don’t expect me to be believe that, I suppose.”

“Yes,” she went on, “it must be selfishness.  You don’t believe I’m so, because you can’t imagine it.  But it’s true.  If I were to be happy, I should be very greedy about it; I couldn’t endure to let any one else have a part in it.  So it’s best for me to be wretched, don’t you see—­to give myself up entirely to doing for others, and not expect any one to do anything for me; then I can be of some use in the world.  That’s why I should like to go into a sisterhood.”

Mavering treated it as the best kind of joke, and he was confirmed in this view of it by her laughing with him, after a first glance of what he thought mock piteousness.

XVI.

The clouds sailed across the irregular space of pale blue Northern sky which the break in the woods opened for them overhead.  It was so still that they heard, and smiled to hear, the broken voices of the others, who had gone to get berries in another direction—­Miss Anderson’s hoarse murmur and Munt’s artificial bass.  Some words came from the party on the rocks.

“Isn’t it perfect?” cried the young fellow in utter content.

“Yes, too perfect,” answered the girl, rousing herself from the reverie in which they had both lost themselves, she did not know how long.  “Shall you gather any more?”

“No; I guess there’s enough.  Let’s count them.”  He stooped over on his hand’s and knees, and made as much of counting the bunches as he could.  “There’s about one bunch and a half a piece.  How shall we carry them?  We ought to come into camp as impressively as possible.”

“Yes,” said Alice, looking into his face with dreamy absence.  It was going through her mind, from some romance she had read, What if he were some sylvan creature, with that gaiety, that natural gladness and sweetness of his, so far from any happiness that was possible to her?  Ought not she to be afraid of him?  She was thinking she was not afraid.

“I’ll tell you,” he said.  “Tie the stems of all the bunches together, and swing them over a pole, like grapes of Eshcol.  Don’t you know the picture?”

“Oh yes.”

“Hold on!  I’ll get the pole.”  He cut a white birch sapling, and swept off its twigs and leaves, then he tied the bunches together, and slung them over the middle of the pole.

“Well?” she asked.

“Now we must rest the ends on our shoulders.”

“Do you think so?” she asked, with the reluctance that complies.

“Yes, but not right away.  I’ll carry them out of the woods, and we’ll form the procession just before we come in sight.”