Mr. Lyndsay, as we now know, came back without having seen Mr. Carington. His purpose was, however, unchanged. Yet, as there was no immediate need to act, and no present danger, he concluded to wait, quite sure that the two gentlemen on whom he had called must, when they returned his courtesy, give him an easy chance to say to Carington what he had heard. Thus having decided what to do, and that delay involved no possibility of mischief, he put it all aside for the time.

Meanwhile, the Island Camp was the scene of amusing debate. The next morning, as they lay on their tent mattresses and smoked that most blissful first love of the day, the after-breakfast pipe, Ellett took up the talk of the night before.

“I told you that you would get in a scrape.”

“It wasn’t that. ‘My lands!’ as Mrs. Maybrook says, what a noble adventure! If I only could do it again! No, I don’t repent. Far from it; I would like to do it again. It was just too altogether delicious, as the girls say.”

“But you will have to call. Mr. Lyndsay has been to see you, and go to see him you must, if I have to carry you!”

170“But I can’t and I won’t! I am a bad boy. Just now it is all a beautiful and adventurous dream. I don’t want to see that woman again—ever. It would spoil the romance of it. Go yourself. You can drop down in mid-morning. No one will be in. Leave my card on the table.”

“What stuff, Fred! You can’t get out of it. Mr. Lyndsay wants to see you. He called on you, not on me.”

“But I don’t want to see him. Imagine my having to explain and apologize, and fetch the whole thing down to the dreary level of prose. I am ill; I am dead; I shall go home—anything!”

He was at his high level of reckless enjoyment of a delightful indiscretion, and a part of his delight lay in the distress it occasioned his soberly conventional friend. He was himself, in truth, a graver man than Ellett, but took into his work as a successful engineer the same gaiety which ran riot in his holiday hours. It had its value with the men who did work under his eyes, and helped him and them over some hard places. At need he became instantly a cool, watchful, cautious man, with the bearing and reserve of middle life. To those who saw him only in his utter abandonment of glee, ready as a boy for any merry enterprise, and by no means disliking it the more if it brought physical risks, it was hardly conceivable that he should be, back of all this, a man of strong opinions, political and religious, of definite views, and of an almost fantastic sense of honor.

“Can’t you be decently quiet a moment, and think a little?”

171“Don’t want to,” returned Carington. “Git away wid ye! You are like Eve: you want to introduce a knowledge of good and evil into this Eden of mine. Go, fish and let me alone. I want to dream it over: that scene in the wood, the rain, the wild orange, light for a minute, that copper-head saint. It was really great, Oliver! Beats the Bowery Theater! And, oh!—I forgot to tell you. She told her pa I was such a good bowman!—so thoughtful! and couldn’t she have me always? Always, Oliver! The bliss of that!”

“I don’t see how you can see anything amusing in it, Fred. It isn’t as if this was some common New York girl, with a boarding-school civilization. Now that’s a rather neat phrase, ‘a boarding-school civilization.’”

“Is it? What else?”

“Nothing. I only meant to say these Lyndsays are gentlefolk, and won’t be very well pleased.”

“You old idiot! Do you suppose I don’t know that? Put your brains to work. Here am I at the end of the first volume of a lovely romance; situation entirely novel. I wish to stop there; the second and third volumes are sure to fall off dismally. The problem is, how not to go on; or, if I must, how to drop from poetry to prose.”

“I should think you must have dropped pretty distinctly when Mr. Lyndsay paid you; I suppose he did.”

“Sir, I was paid in gold of the Bank of Spain—in coin no longer current—by the woman herself.”

“Would you kindly interpret?”

172“I will”; and he told the scene on the beach.

“Let me see that gold dollar.”

“See it! Not I. No profane eyes shall—”

“Stuff and nonsense! She will very likely want it back. Probably it was a luck-penny.”

“Very like. I shall keep it for luck. You are an iconoclast of dreams. Let’s go and kill fish. I have been trying to divide my enchanted mood with you. It has been a dismal failure. The fact is, I know as well as you—and a blank sight better—that this is a lady, that these are nice people, and that I am in a scrape. But to-day they may all go to the deuce and the bow-wows. ‘Let the great world spin forever, down the ringing grooves of change.’ He must have meant a railway. I never thought of that before. Don’t bother. I’ll go and call some day. Come, let’s kill salmon.” And they went to their canoes.

While this dreadful thing was agitating Mr. Ellett’s mind, it was also receiving due consideration at the breakfast-table of the Cliff Camp.

Rose Lyndsay, despite remonstrance, had been sent at once to bed on her return, and supplied with hot tea and more substantial diet, and ordered to go to sleep. Next to being wicked through and through, to be wet through and through was, to Mrs. Lyndsay’s mind, one of the most serious of human catastrophes. She was gently positive, and so Rose lay very wide-awake, and considered at ease the events of a most agreeable day, until, thinking with a little regret of her luck-penny, she fell asleep, only to wake up with the sunlight streaming in as her mother 173opened the curtains, and to hear the pervasive voices of the boys singing under her window:
Up in the mornin’ ’s nae for me!

“Overslept yourself, Rose!”

“Are you dry yet?”

“That salmon is only thirty pounds. You awful fraud!”

“All right, dear, to-day?” were the salutations of the noisy table, as she distributed her morning kisses, and at last sat down.

“One at a time,” she replied. “Fair play, boys. First, I am nearly dry. Second, salmon always loses weight.”

“I have noticed that,” laughed her father. “Tell us all about it, my dear.” And upon this she related the adventures of the previous day.

“I must have my luck-penny,” she added. “I was a goose to give it away, but I was so cold and wet, and I was in such a hurry. I hated to send the man away without a cent.”

“It is odd that he took it,” said Anne.

“Yes,” returned her brother. “These fellows are sharp enough about their pay and about money; and he couldn’t have known what he was taking. These coins circulate no longer, even in the States. He never said a word, but merely put it in his pocket. What sort of a fellow is he, Rose?”

“It is so hard to describe people.”

“It is impossible,” said Anne, “even on a passport.”

174“Not quite. Tall, and curly hair—very curly hair.”

“That’s satisfactory, Rose,” remarked Jack.

“I had not done. Oh, what I thought strange was the man’s manner. Now and then he spoke as if he was talking to an equal, and really he has a voice quite full of pleasant tones. The next minute he talked like Thunder Tom, or worse.”

“I must ask Carington about him. By the way, I was right as to Ellett. He is a son of my old companion. I fancy they will be here to-day or to-morrow. If this present Oliver is like his father, he will be solid, stolid,—a rock of good sense.”

“I don’t want him, Marcus Aurelius, nor the other. For a first-class B. O. I prefer my young man of the gold dollar. But I must have it again. I am not at all sure now that honesty is the best policy. When you see Mr. Carington, Pardy, do ask about the man. He seemed quite above his class. Ned, I cannot wait for you to finish your interminable meal.”

“I think he just chews for exercise,” said Dick. “Might arrange, if the meat was tough enough, to keep his appetite up all the time. Wouldn’t that be fine, Ned?”

“I don’t think any of my boys require artificial aid,” said Mrs. Lyndsay. “Dugald Dalgetty was a trifler to you.”

“I haven’t got to the fish yet, and it’s my own salmon,” said the boy, helping himself.

“We want to have Rose to-day,” said Dick, between mouthfuls. “I want her to go up to the brook. There’s a marsh there, and Drosera—oh, lots! It’s far north for it, too.”

175“What is Drosera, Dicky?”

“Fly-trap; and there are some purple orchids.”

“For this once I will compromise,” said Anne. “I want to see Archie kill a salmon. If you will assure me of Rose to-morrow afternoon, you may have her to-day.”

“And I am to take care of myself,” said her brother. “I never hear of compromises without thinking of Dr. North’s illustration. I must have told you, Margaret.”

“If you ever did, I have forg............