ck became suddenly and violently agitated. Marion was
turning over with a movement that, in one less gracefully slim, might
be called a flop.

"Well, good night! I hope you'll excuse me, Kate, for beating it," she
said, sitting up. "But I've heard The Cloud till I could say it
backwards with my tongue paralyzed. I'll go down by the creek and
finish my sleep." She took the three remaining cushions under her arms
and departed. At the creek she paused, her ear turned toward the shady
spot beyond the cabin. She heard Kate's elocutionary voice declaiming
brightly:

"From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds, every one--"

She went on a little farther, until she could hear only the higher
tones of Kate's voice above the happy gurgle of the stream. She
scrambled through a willow tangle, stopped on the farther side to
listen, and smiled when the water talked to her with no interruption
of human voices.

"And Doug thinks he's a real nature lover!" she commented, throwing
her cushions down into a grassy little hollow under the bank. "But if
he would rather hear Kate elocute about it than to lie and listen to
the real thing, he's nothing more or less than a nature pirate." She
curled herself down among the cushions and stared up through the
slender willow branches into the top of an alder that leaned over the
bank and dangled its finger-tip branches playfully toward her.

"You pretty thing!" she cooed to it. "What does ail people, that they
sit around and talk about you and make up rhymes about you, when you
just want them to come out and love you! You darling! Words only make
you cheap. Now whisper to me, all about when you woke up last spring
and found the sun warm and waiting--Go on--tell me about it, and what
you said to the creek, and all."

Having listened to Kate's dramatic rendition of the poem he liked, the
professor went over and made himself comfortable in the hammock and
began talking again about the fire. It was a magnificent spectacle, he
declared, although he was really too close to it to obtain the best
view. A lot of fine timber was ruined, of course; but fortunately not
a tree on any of their claims had been touched. The wind had blown the
flames in another direction.

"It would have been terrible to have a fire start in our timber," he
went on. "We should lose all that we have put into the venture so
far--and that would mean a good deal to us all. As it stand