d with little Dan, Hildreth with her husband,
Penton,--Darrie with me....

"Drag back a little, Johnnie ... Penton and Hildreth are having a
private heart-to-heart talk, I can tell by their voices."

We hung back till they disappeared around a bend. We were alone. Darrie
began to laugh and laugh and laugh.... "Oh, it's so funny, I shall die
laughing"....

* * * * *

"Why--why, what's the matter!"

For I saw tears streaming down the girl's face in the moonlight.

"It's so awful," replied Darrie, now crying quietly, "--so tragic ...
yet I had to laugh ... I'm so sorry for Penton ... for both of them....

"Penton _is_ such a jackass, Johnnie," she gulped, "and God knows, as I
do, he's such an honest, good man ... helping poor people all over the
country ... really fighting the fight of the down-trodden and the
oppressed."

I put my arm around the girl's waist, and she wept on my shoulder.

Finally she straightened up her head, stopping her crying with
difficulty.

"We're all so funny, aren't we?"

"Yes, we're a funny bunch, Darrie ... all so mixed up,--the world
wouldn't believe it, would they, if we told them?"

"And you could never make them understand, even if you did tell them.
You know, my dear, old Southern daddy--he thinks Penton is a limb of the
old Nick himself ... with his theories about life, and the freedom of
relations between the sexes, and all that ... even yet he may leave me
out of his will for coming up here, though he has all the confidence in
the world in me."

And Mary Darfield Malcolm--whom we always called "Darrie"--went quickly
to her room when we got back, so the others wouldn't notice that she had
been crying....

* * * * *

Quite often, in the afternoons, toward dusk, around a dying fire, the
whole community had "sings" out in the woods, near the one large stream
that abutted the colony, and gathered into itself, all the little
brooks....

The old songs were sung; rich, beautiful, old Scotch and English and
Irish ballads--which were learnt, by all who wanted to know them, at the
singing school ... and the old-fashioned American songs, too.

And the music softened our hearts and fused us into one harmony of
feeling. And all the bickerings of the community's various "isms" melted
away ... after all, there was not so very much disharmony among us. And,
after all, the marvel is that human beings get along together at