ay enough to run a small fountain
in the center, surrounded by a pond-lily bed which would be kept in
place by a stone curbing. In the hill to the right there was a deep
indenture. Back in there would go the bathing pavilions. They even
went up to look at it, and were delighted to find a natural, shallow
bowl. By cementing the floor of that bowl they could have a splendid
swimming-pool for timid bathers, where they could not go beyond their
depth; and it was entirely surrounded by a thick screen of shrubbery.
Oh, it was delightful; it was perfect! At the road they looked back up
over the valley again. It was no longer a valley. It was a lake.
They could see the water there. Sam drew from his pocket a pencil and
an envelope.

"The hotel will have to be long and tall," he observed, "for there will
not be much room on that ledge, from front to back. The building will
stretch out quite a ways. Three or four hundred feet long it will be,
and about five stories in height," and taking a letter from the
envelope, he sat down upon a fallen log and began rapidly to sketch.

He drew the hotel with wide-spreading Spanish roofs and balconies, and
a wide porch with rippling water in front of it, and rowboats and
people in them; and behind the hotel rose the broken sky-line of the
hills and the trees, with an indication of fleecy clouds above. It was
just a light sketch, a sort of shorthand picture, as it were, and yet
it seemed full of sunlight and of atmosphere.

"I hadn't any idea you could draw like that," she exclaimed in
admiration.

"I do a little of everything, I think, but nothing perfectly," he
admitted with some regret.

"It seems to me you do everything excellently," she objected quite
seriously; and she was, in fact, deeply impressed.

He walked over to the stream, a trifle confused, but not displeased, by
any means, by the earnestness of her compliment.

"I must have the water analyzed to see if it has any medicinal virtue,"
he said. "The spring out of which we drank has a sweetish-like taste,
but the water here--" and he caught up some of it in his hand and
tasted it, "seems to be slightly salt."

He had left her sitting on the log with the sketch in her lap. Now the
sketch fluttered to the ground and the letter turned over, right side
up. It was a letter which Sam had written to his brother Jack and had
not mailed because he had suddenly decided to come down to the scene of
action. As she stoop