in his throat. Afterward, he slaked his
thirst as he could at the trickle from the rock's lip, and then set his
face toward the higher steeps. Major Dabney,--not yet fully in tune with
his new neighbors of the country-house colony,--and his granddaughter
were spending the summer at Crestcliffe Inn, the new hotel on top of the
mountain, and Tom felt that Ardea would understand if he could find and
tell her. There are times when one must find a sympathetic ear, or be
rent and torn by the pent-up things within.

In one sense the sympathy quest was a devitalizing failure. When he
reached the summit of the mountain, hot and tired and dusty, the mere
sight of the great hotel, with its thronged verandas and its
overpowering air of grandeur and exclusiveness, quenched all desires
save that which prompted a hasty retreat. The sectarian school paid as
little attention to the social as to the athletic side of its youth; and
Tom Gordon at fifteen past was as helpless conventionally as if he had
never set foot outside of Paradise.

But at the retractive moment he ran plump into the Major, stalking
grandly along the tile-paved walk and smoking a war-time cheroot of
preposterous length. The despot of Paradise, despot now only by courtesy
of the triumphant genius of modernity, put on his eye-glasses and stared
Thomas into respectful rigidity.

"Why, bless my soul!--if it isn't Captain Gordon's boy! Well, well, you
young limb! If you didn't faveh youh good fatheh in eve'y line and
lineament of youh face, I should neveh have known you--you've grown so.
Shake hands, suh!"

Tom did it awkwardly. It is a gift to be able to shake hands easily; a
gift withheld from most girls and all boys up to the soulful age. But
there was worse to follow. Ardea was somewhere on the peopled verandas,
and the Major, more terrible in his hospitality than he had ever
appeared in the old-time rage-fits, dragged his hapless victim up and
down and around and about in search of her. "Not say 'Howdy' to Ardea?
Why, you young cub, where are youh mannehs, suh?" Thus the Major, when
the victim would have broken away.

It was a fiery trial for Tom--a way-picking among red-hot plowshares of
embarrassment. How the well-bred folk smiled, and the grand ladies drew
their immaculate skirts aside to make passing-room for his dusty feet!
How one of them wondered, quite audibly, where in the world Major Dabney
had unearthed that young native! Tom was conscious of every fle