idge. They leaned on the
parapet, looking down at the marshy stream beneath and at the three
irises Kerr had remarked, knee-deep in swamp ground.

"Now that I see them I suppose I want them," Flora remarked.

"Of course," he assented. "Then hold all these."

He put into her hands the loose bunch of syringa and rose plucked for
her in the Purdies' garden, laid his hat and gloves on the parapet;
then, with an eye for the better bank, walked to the end of the bridge.

She watched him descending the steep bank and issuing into the broad
shallow basin of the stream's way. The sun was still high enough to fill
the hollows with warm light and mellow the doubles of trees and grass in
the stream. In this landscape of green and pale gold he looked black and
tall and angular. The wind blew longish locks of hair across his
forehead, and she had a moment's pleased and timorous reflection that
he looked like Satan coming into the Garden.

He advanced from tussock to tussock. He came to the brink of the marsh.
The lilies wavered what seemed but a hand's-breadth from him. But he
stooped, he reached--Oh, could anything so foolish happen as that he
could not get them! Or, more foolish still, plunge in to the knees! He
straightened from his fruitless effort, drew back, but before she could
think what he was about he had leaned forward again, flashed out his
cane, and with three quick, cutting slashes the lilies were mown. It was
deftly, delicately, astonishingly done, but it gave her a singular
shock, as if she had seen a hawk strike its prey. He drew them cleverly
toward him in the crook of his cane, took them up daintily in his
fingers, and returned to her across the shallow valley. She waited him
with mixed emotions.

[Illustration: HE TOOK THE LILIES UP DAINTILY, AND RETURNED TO HER.]

"Oh, how could you!" she murmured, as he put them into her hand.

He looked at her in amused astonishment. "Why, aren't they right?"

They were as clean clipped off and as perfect as if the daintiest hand
had plucked them.

"Oh, yes," she admitted, "they're lovely, but I don't like the way you
got them."

"I took the means I had," he objected.

"I don't think I like it."

His whole face was sparkling with interest and amusement. "Is that so?
Why not?"

"You're too--too"--she cast about for the word--"too terribly
resourceful!"

"I see," he said. If she had feared he would laugh, it showed how little
she had gauged the limits of his la