n-bread in the
one small skillet. "This is my first real adventure. I wish I might know
whether I dare enjoy it as much as I'd like to."

"Why not?" he asked.

"Oh, the conventions, I suppose. We can't run fast enough or far enough
to get away from them. I am wondering what the senior faculty would say
if it could see me just now."

Prime grinned appreciatively. "It would probably shriek and expire."

"Happily it can't see; and to-morrow--surely Mr. Grider will come back
for us to-morrow, won't he?"

"We are going to sleep soundly in that comforting belief, anyway. Which
reminds me: you will have to have some sort of a place to sleep in. Why
didn't I think of that before dark?"

Immediately after supper, and before he would permit himself to roll a
cigarette from the diminishing supply of precious tobacco, Prime fell
upon his problem, immensely willing but prodigiously inexperienced. At
first he thought he would build a shack, but the lack of an axe put that
out of the question. Round by round, ambition descended the ladder of
necessity, and the result was nothing better than a camper's bed of
broken pine twigs sheltered and housed in by a sort of bower built from
such tree branches as he could break off by main strength.

The young woman did not withhold her meed of praise, especially after
she had seen his blistered hands, which were also well daubed with pitch
from the pines.

"It's a shame!" she said. "I ought not to have let you work so hard. If
it should happen to rain, you'd need the shelter much more than I
should."

"Why do you say that?"

"You don't look so very fit," was the calm reply; "and I _am_ fit. Do
you know, my one ambition, as a little girl, was to grow up and be an
acrobat in a circus?"

"And yet you landed in the laboratory of a girls' school," he laughed.

"Not exclusively," she countered quickly. "Last year I was also an
assistant in the gymnasium. Swimming was my specialty, but I taught
other things as well."

Prime laughed again. "And I can't swim a single stroke," he confessed.
"Isn't that a humiliating admission on the part of a man who has lived
the greater part of his life in sight of the ocean?"

Miss Millington said she thought it was, and in such gladsome fashion
the evening wore away. When it came time to sleep, the lately risen moon
lighted the young woman to her bower; and Prime, replenishing the fire,
made his bed in the sand, the unwonted exertions of the day and e