The next day they all walked up beyond the ranch-house, and followed the dripping flume to the dam.  And here, beside a wide sheet of blue water, they built their fire, and had their lunch, and afterward spent a long hour in the water.  Quail called through the woods, and rabbits flashed out of sight at the sound of human voices, and once, in a silence, a doe, with a bright-eyed fawn clinking after her on the stones, came down to the farther shore for a drink.

“You ought to live this sort of life all the time, Sue!” Billy said idly, as they sat sunning themselves on the wide stone bulkhead that held back the water.

“I?  Why?” asked Susan, marking the smooth cement with a wet forefinger.

“Because you’re such a kid, Sue—­you like it all so much!”

“Knowing what you know of me, Bill, I wonder that you can think of me as young at all,” the girl answered drily, suddenly somber and raising shamed eyes to his.

“How do you mean?” he stammered, and then, suddenly enlightened, he added scornfully, “Oh, Lord!”

“That—–­” Susan said quietly, still marking the hot cement, “will keep me from ever—­ever being happy, Bill—–­” Her voice thickened, and she stopped speaking.

“I don’t look at that whole episode as you do, Sue,” Billy said gruffly after a moment’s embarrassed silence.  “I don’t believe chance controls those things.  I often think of it when some man comes to me with a hard-luck story.  His brother cheated him, and a factory burned down, and he was three months sick in a hospital—­ yes, that may all be true!  But follow him back far enough and you’ll find he was a mean man from the very start, ruined a girl in his home town, let his wife support his kids.  It’s years ago now perhaps, but his fate is simply working out its natural conclusion.  Somebody says that character is fate, Sue,—­you’ve always been sweet and decent and considerate of other people, and your fate saved you through that.  You couldn’t have done anything wrong—­it’s not in you!”

He looked up with his bright smile but Susan could hear no more.  She had scrambled to her feet while he was speaking, now she stopped only long enough to touch his shoulder with a quick, beseeching pressure.  The next instant she was walking away, and he knew that her face was wet with tears.  She plunged into the pool, and swam steadily across the silky expanse, and when he presently joined her, with Anna and Betts, she was quite herself again.

Quite her old self, and the life and heart of everything they did.  Anna laughed until the tears stood in her eyes, the others, more easily moved, went from one burst of mirth to another.  They were coming home past the lumber mill when Billy fell in step just beside her, and the others drifted on without them.  There was nothing in that to startle Susan, but she did feel curiously startled, and a little shy, and managed to keep a conversation going almost without help.