e ... for I
had been playing satyr to her nymph, pursuing her....

* * * * *

And each day saw us a little more reckless, more bold and open in our
love, our passion, for each other.

* * * * *

"How handsome love is making you, my Paphnutius!"

I was wearing my bath-robe, had stopped at her cottage a moment, in the
morning, where she sat, in an easy chair, reading peacefully ... I was
on my way for my morning dip in a nearby brook....

My bath-robe, that made me, somehow, feel so aristocratic, so like a
member of the leisure class ... I forgot to tell how I had brought it
all the way from Kansas, together with my MSS.

* * * * *

As I swam about in the brook, not over four feet deep, I sang and
shouted. I had never been so happy in my life....

I dried myself in the sun, using its morning heat for a towel....

As I sat there on a rock, I heard a crackling of twigs, and Penton
thrust his way through the intervening branches to my bare rock and my
bare self ... I hastily, I do not know why, put on my bathrobe....

"Hello, Penton."

"Good morning, Johnnie. I felt you'd be down here for your morning bath
... I came to have a serious talk with you."

"Yes?"

"I want you to take calmly what I am about to say!"

Penton was much impressed with my stories of tramp days and tales of
adventure on land and sea, which you may be sure my sense of the
dramatic had encouraged me to lay on thick--and he, plainly, did not
desire any heat in the discussion which was to follow....

"Recently it has come to my attention that there has been a lot of
gossip about you and Hildreth ... your conduct together." He drew his
lips together tightly, settled himself for a long siege....

"Why, Penton," I began, protestingly and hypocritically,--I had planned
far other and franker conduct in such an emergency--but here I was,
deprecating the truth--

"Why, Penton, God knows--"

"Never mind ... if it is true, I am very sorry for you--for Hildreth's
sake, for yours, for mine ... but I want to warn you, if it is not true,
to look out ... you, as a friend, owe me some obligations ... I have
taken you in here, accepted you as one almost of my family, and--"

"But, Penton, this is unfair," I lied, "unfair even to suspect me--"

"If it had been anybody but you, Johnnie, I would have been suspicious
weeks ago ... Oh, I know, Hildreth ... she