“Oh no!” said Mrs. Brinkley, “nothing is more appropriate to a picnic than conundrums; they always have them.  Choose a good tough one.”

“I don’t know anything tougher than the ’Legend of Pernik’—­or lovelier,” he said, and he began to read, simply, and with a passionate pleasure in the subtle study, feeling its control over his hearers.

The gentlemen lay smoking about at their ease; at the end a deep sigh went up from the ladies, cut short by the question which they immediately fell into.

They could not agree, but they said, one after another:  “But you read beautifully, Mr. Mavering!” “Beautifully!” “Yes, indeed!”

“Well, I’m glad there is one point clear,” he said, putting the book away, and “I’m afraid you’ll think I’m rather sentimental,” he added, in a low voice to Alice, “carrying poetry around with me.”

“Oh no!” she replied intensely; “I thank you.”

“I thank you,” he retorted, and their eyes met in a deep look.

One of the outer circle of smokers came up with his watch in his hand, and addressed the company, “Do you know what time it’s got to be?  It’s four o’clock.”

They all sprang up with a clamour of surprise.

Mrs. Pasmer, under cover of the noise, said, in a low tone, to her daughter, “Alice, I think you’d better keep a little more with me now.”

“Yes,” said the girl, in a sympathy with her mother in which she did not always find herself.

But when Mavering, whom their tacit treaty concerned, turned toward them, and put himself in charge of Alice, Mrs. Pasmer found herself dispossessed by the charm of his confidence, and relinquished her to him.  They were going to walk to the Castle Rocks by the path that now loses and now finds itself among the fastnesses of the forest, stretching to the loftiest outlook on the bay.  The savage woodland is penetrated only by this forgetful path, that passes now and then aver the bridge of a ravine, and offers to the eye on either hand the mystery deepening into wilder and weirder tracts of solitude.  The party resolved itself into twos and threes, and these straggled far apart, out of conversational reach of one another.  Mrs. Pasmer found herself walking and talking with John Munt.

“Mr. Pasmer hasn’t much interest in these excursions,” he suggested.

“No; he never goes,” she answered, and, by one of the agile intellectual processes natural to women, she arrived at the question, “You and the Maverings are old friends, Mr. Munt?”

“I can’t say about the son, but I’m his father’s friend, and I suppose that I’m his friend too.  Everybody seems to be so,” suggested Munt.

“Oh Yes,” Mrs. Pasmer assented; “he appears to be a universal favourite.”

“We used to expect great things of Elbridge Mavering in college.  We were rather more romantic than the Harvard men are nowadays, and we believed in one another more than they do.  Perhaps we idealised one another.  But, anyway, our class thought Mavering could do anything.  You know about his taste for etchings?”