Go and turn over some flat rocks and find
some lizards!"

Geraldine, bare-armed and short-skirted, came swinging along the
woodland path, Delancy Grandcourt dogging her heels, as usual, carrying
a pair of rods and catching the artificial flies in the bushes at every
step.

"We're all out of trout at the house!" she called across to the stream
to her brother. "Jack Dysart is fishing down the creek with Naida and
Sylvia. Where is Duane?"

"Somewhere around, I suppose," replied Scott sulkily. His sister took a
running jump, cleared the bank, and alighted on a rock in the stream.
Poised there she looked back at Grandcourt, laughed, sprang forward
from stone to stone, and leaped to the moss beside Kathleen.

"Hello, dear!" she nodded. "Where did you cross? And where is Duane?"

"We crossed by the log bridge below," replied Kathleen. She added:
"Duane left us half an hour ago. Wasn't it half an hour ago, Scott?"
with a rising inflection that conveyed something of warning, something
of an appeal. But on Scott's face the sullen disconcerted expression had
not entirely faded, and his sister inspected him curiously. Then without
knowing why, exactly, she turned and looked at Kathleen.

There was a subdued and dewy brilliancy in Kathleen's eyes, a bright
freshness to her cheeks, radiantly and absurdly youthful; and something
else--something so indefinable, so subtle, that only another woman's
instinct might divine it--something invisible and inward, which
transfigured her with a youthful loveliness almost startling.

They looked at one another. Geraldine, conscious of something she could
not understand, glanced again at her sulky brother.

"What's amiss, Scott?" she asked. "Has anything gone wrong anywhere?"

Scott, pretending to be very busy untangling Grandcourt's cast from the
branches of a lusty young birch, said, "No, of course not," and the
girl, wondering, turned to Kathleen, who sustained her questioning eyes
without a tremor.

"What's the matter with Scott?" asked his sister. "He's the
guiltiest-looking man--why, it's absurd, Kathleen! Upon my word, the boy
is blushing!"

"What!" exclaimed Scott so furiously that everybody laughed. And
presently Geraldine asked again where Duane was.

"Rosalie Dysart is canoeing on the Gray Water, and she hailed him and he
left us and went down to the river," said Kathleen carelessly.

"Did Duane join her?"

"I think so--" She hesitated, watching Geraldine's sombre eyes.