find seclusion when we
must return in two or three months, anyhow? It's a scandalous waste.
We can go to the Dolomites for our second honeymoon--we'll have one
every year. And this is much more in the picture if you want to be
Mary Ogden again. She never would have proposed anything so elaborate
and unnecessary. Say yes, and don't be more than a minute about it."

Mary drew in her breath sharply. The plan made a violent and
irresistible appeal. There would be no long interval for possible
reversal, for contacts in which it might be difficult to hold fast to
her new faith. But what excuse could she make to leave him
later? . . . Later? Did Austria really exist? Did she care? Let the
future take care of itself. Her horizon, a luminous band, encircled
these mountains. . . . She smiled into his ardent eyes. "Very well.
I'll write to Hortense today and tell her to send me up a trousseau of
sorts. And now--you are to understand that you have not dared to
propose to me yet and are suffering all the qualms of uncertainty, for
I am a desperate flirt, and took a long walk in the woods this morning
with Mr. Scores."

"Very well, Miss Ogden, I will now do my best to make a fool of myself,
and as soon as we return to camp will telegraph to New York for a
five-pound box of chocolates."

"Hark! Hark! The Lark!" shouted Todd as he rowed past with Babette
Gold. "Only there isn't a lark or any other bird in these woods that
I've been able to discover."

"Birds sing one at a time," shouted back Clavering. "Choir of jealous
soloists."

He rowed into a little cove and they gazed into the dim green woods,
but the maple leaves grew almost to the ground, and it was like peering
through the tiny changing spaces of a moving curtain through which one
glimpsed green columns flecked with gold.

He beached the boat, and they walked, single file, up a narrow run-way
made by the deer. Everywhere was that leafy whispering curtain.
Between the rigid spruce and soft maples were fragrant balsams, and
ferns, and an occasional pine with its pale green spikes. They passed
enormous boulders detached from the glaciers that had ground mountains
in their embrace, but today things of mere beauty in their coats of
pink and green and golden moss.

Their footsteps made no sound on the mossy path, and they came suddenly
upon a deer and his doe drinking at a pool. But the antlered head was
flung back instantly, the magnificent buck wheel