ith each stamp of the little foot. "I won't, I
won't, I won't!"

And saying "I won't," she did. She sat down at the table and on her pale
blue letter paper, wrote:

"DEAR AUNTIE:--Yes, you were right, I guess. I _am_ a
cling-to. I want him. I don't care: he's mine and I
_won't_ give him up. Tell me how to do it, Auntie, oh,
tell me how! Quick, Auntie, quick!"

The answer was not long in coming. "Dearest Little Dolly," wrote Aunt
Hester; "of course, I knew you would, and I am glad. As to telling you
how--well, that is very simple. Just go to him, Dolly. Go to him (not too
soon; wait a while) and just stick around. Your instincts will tell you
the rest. Rely on your instincts, Dolly," went on this incorrigible
Darwinian. "They are better than your reason, for they are the reason of
your mother and grandmother, and all the line of mothers that came before
you. _They_ had to be right, Dolly, or they wouldn't have been, and then
_you_ wouldn't be. Go to him, and stick around, and do as you feel like
doing. In all probability you'll be nice, and humble, and snuggledy, and
warm. And then, make--your arrangements. _He_ can't help himself. Nature
is on your side. His dice are loaded. Cling, Dolly, cling."

Dolly blushed. "Auntie is horrid," she said. And then, after a while,
"But right," she said.

CHAPTER IX

Meanwhile, unaware of this discussion and of this decision,
Charles-Norton, inflated with fancied freedom, captain of his soul and
master of his Fate, was having a beautiful time.

Tableau:

A meadow by a lake, on the western slope of a high Sierra.

Below, and far to the west, lies a great plain, liquid with distance as
though it were a sea of gold. From its nearer edge, the land comes
leaping up in wide smooth waves of serried pines, to the meadow. There
the pines stop abruptly, in the leaning immobility of a man who has
almost trodden upon a flower. From their feet the meadow spreads, fresh
and lush, susurrant with the hidden flow of a brook, and jeweled here and
there with flowers that are like butterflies. It stops, in its turn,
before a chute of smooth granite in the form of a bowl. In the curve of
the bowl lies a lake--a silvery lake in the depths of which dark blue
hues pulse, and over the face of which light zephyrs pass, like painted
shivers.

On the other side of the lake, to the east, the land continues to rise,
in accelerated assault, first in long lustrous leaps of glac