loyd helped
herself in picnic fashion from a plate of fried chicken, he said,
laughing, "Look at Elaine now. Tennyson wouldn't know his Lily Maid if
he saw her in this way." He struck an attitude, declaiming dramatically,
"In her right hand the wish-bone, in her left the olive."

"That's all right," answered Lloyd, tossing the olive stone out on the
grass, and helping herself to a beaten biscuit. "I always did think that
Elaine was a dreadful goose to go floating down the rivah to a man who
didn't care two straws about her. She'd much bettah have held on to a
wish-bone and an olive and stayed up in her high towah with her fathah
and brothahs who appreciated her. She would have had a bettah time and
he would have had lots moah respect for her."

"Oh, I don't think so," cooed Miss Bonham, with a coquettish side
glance at Phil. "That always seemed such a beautifully romantic
situation to me. Doesn't it appeal to you, Mr. Tremont?"

Mary listened for Phil's answer with grave attention, for she, too,
considered it a touching situation, and more than once had pictured, in
pleasing day-dream, herself as Elaine, floating down a stream in that
poetic fashion.

"Well, no, Miss Bonham," said Phil, laughingly. "I'm free to confess
that if I had been Sir Lancelot, I'd have liked her a great deal better
if she had been a cheerful sort of body, and had stayed alive. Then if
she had come rowing up in a nice trig little craft, instead of that
spooky old funeral barge, and had offered me a wish-bone and an olive,
I'd have thought them twice as fetching as a lily and that doleful
letter. I'd have joined her picnic in a jiffy, and probably had such a
jolly time that the poem would have ended with wedding bells in the high
tower instead of a funeral dirge in the palace.

"She wasn't game," he continued, smiling across at Mary, who was
listening with absorbing attention. "Now if she had only lived up to the
Vicar of Wakefield's motto--instead of mooning over Lancelot's old
shield, and embroidering things for it, and acting as if it were
something too precious for ordinary mortals to touch--if she'd batted it
into the corner, or made mud pies on it, to show that she was
inflexible, fortune _would_ have changed in her favor. Sir Lancelot
would have had some respect for her common sense."

Mary, who felt that the remark was addressed to her, crimsoned
painfully. Rob took up the question, and his opinion was the same as
Phil's and Malcolm