Lyndsay had set his heart on a second Sunday morning on the river, with Rose and the trees. She readily gave up her proposed morning visit to Dorothy, and said the afternoon would answer. Miss Anne thought she herself was strong enough for the party, and Rose, much pleased, set about arranging her cushions in Tom’s canoe.

“We will be back to lunch, mama,” said Rose. “It is early. Will it rain? It looks hazy.”

“It is smoke, Rose. Some far-away fire. Where are the boys, Tom?”

“Up-river, sir, with the Gaspé men.”

“Who gave them leave to go?”

“You, papa,” said Rose. “I suspect they have gone after those unhappy hornets. They were up and away long ago. They asked you last night.”

“Did they?”

“Yes; you were deep in a book, and said ‘Yes, yes,’ in your dear old absent way.”

“I am sorry. Mama thinks it a naughty amusement at best, and when there is also the additional naughtiness of battle on Sunday! Well, they will be properly stung with remorse or hornet-fangs, or 266a combination. The wounded will be pardoned, I fancy. Hey, Rose?”

“Like enough.”

Mrs. Maybrook’s vivid account of Susan Colkett’s talk with Joe had made on Lyndsay at first a strong impression of disgust and annoyance. He saw in it, after cooler reflection, only one of the numberless beginnings of tragic crime which are refused the prosperity of opportunity. We have no proverbial wisdom as to what place bad intentions go to pave; but those who see much of the darker ways of man are well aware that there is much intended evil, as well as intended good, which never gets beyond the egg of theory. The crime which Susan Colkett was nursing with the devil-milk of base use of a man’s honest love grew less momentous to Lyndsay as he considered it. Once suspected, it became to him almost childlike in its foolishness. Crime-seed, like the grain of the parable, falls everywhere. There is a human climate in which, above all others, it finds swift maturity of growth.

Susan Colkett was by nature inclined to evil. She had base animal cravings, liking high colors and coarse meats. A want was with her at once a fierce hunger of desire, and made temptation dangerous to one who had in its crude fullness brute courage, and that dreadful alliance of the sensual with the destructive instincts which is more rare in woman than in man. But of Susan Colkett’s personality Lyndsay knew almost nothing. He was, however, by no means indifferent as to the matter, but had simply put off speaking of it to Carington for want of an easy chance.

267As they came opposite the Island Camp, Lyndsay said abruptly:

“Run her up onto the beach, Pierre.”

“Are you going to stop? I wish you wouldn’t stop, papa. We have a very short time to-day.”

“I shall be back in a moment. I have been putting off a little matter of—of business with Carington. I shall not be long.” Meanwhile Anne Lyndsay’s canoe also came to shore.

Rose said no more. She saw her father disappear into the tent, come out with Carington, and begin to walk to and fro on the upper slope. Very soon she began to be curious, as she saw them pause and turn and go on again.

“What are they talking about, Aunt Anne?”

Miss Lyndsay looked up from a book. “How on earth, my dear, should I know?”

“But are you not curious?”

“Yes, I am always curious—as to the good, and as to the bad, and as to everything in between.”

Rose laughed. “That covers the whole possibilities. Here they come. Now I shall know.”

“I don’t think you will.”

“A pair of gloves to a pound of bonbons.”

“Done, goosey! Whom will you ask?”

“That is my business. There was no limit of time.”

“None! But you will lose. Your father looks solemn, and Mr. Carington like a sphinx.”

“Given two men and one woman, aunty, and a thing to find out: that seems an easy equation.”

“I see the unknown quantity written clear on both faces. You won’t win.”

268Carington stood a moment in gay chat with Rose. Then Lyndsay said:

“You won’t come with us?”

“No; not to-day.” His question was settled without the thermometer. He was clear enough as to the indiscreetness of a useless morning with Rose and two others, and a meeting at Mrs. Maybrook’s in the afternoon. He would abide by the later chance and its less distracting accompaniments.

“We shall look for you both to-morrow,” said Miss Anne Lyndsay. And they poled away up the river, while Rose talked to her father, biding her time to win her little bet.

Anne, lying in her own canoe, and very comfortable, fell into amused reflection. If books were what she dearly loved and closely studied, she had a no less active fancy for that rarer occupation, the serious study of the human face. It is a difficult branch of observation, because one may not too often or too attentively examine the features of those with whom we are in immediate social contact. Like her friend, Dr. North, she preferred on the whole the critical study of women’s faces. She declared that only these repaid attention, and that the hirsute growths of men were, like the jungle, useful for the concealment of animal expressions. She remarked with interest that Carington lacked this partial mask, and said to herself, “That man has something on his mind. Is it about what Archie has been telling him? I shall ask Archie.” Then she went back to her book, which was her favorite “Reisebilder.”

In the other canoe, Rose had brought the talk 269around several sharp corners, and at last, having no better chance, said:

“You looked worried, Pardy, or so very grave, when you were talking to Mr. Carington. Has he been naughty, papa?”

“No.”

“Well, what was it? You both seemed so intent.”

“Allow me, miss, to ask if interest in me, in Mr. Carington, or in the unknown is at the thriving root of your evident curiosity?”

“In you, Marc. Aurelius.”

“That is pretty clever, miss. Permit me to reply, in the language of my namesake, ‘Mere curiosity is like a road which leads nowhere: what profits it to go that way? Also as to things it may be well, or as to those in whom we have an interest, but not as to the horde of men.’ Now, as you have expressed no interest in it as a thing unknown, and none as to Mr. Carington, or mankind, and as it concerns him chiefly, I shall forever after hold my peace. You lost your chance.”

“Give me another.”

“Not I.”

“But I made a bet with Aunt Anne.”

“Then pay it. Have you exhausted your feminine arts?”

“All—I give up; but I mean to know. I shall ask Mr. Carington.”

“I wouldn’t do that, my dear child.”

“Oh, Pardy! How you rose to that fly! Imagine it!”

“You minx! Halloa, Tom! Hold up a moment. 270drop anchor here. I want to stop.” They were near to the farther bank. “Here, Pierre, put your canoe alongside. Are you all right, Anne?”

“Perfectly.”

“I want to show you something before the sun is too high. Can you sketch here, Rose? The boat is pretty quiet?”

“I am not sure; I can try.”

“How much darker it is, Tom!”

“Yes, sir. It’s the smoke. It’s been about a bit for a day or two. Now the wind’s to south, it’s gettin’ kind of thicker. There’s a big fire somewhere.”

“How far?”

“Might be a hundred miles away. ‘Heap big smudge,’ Polycarp says.”

“Look now,” said Lyndsay. “Try to get me these water-tints. Take a bit of it.”

“I can’t. What makes these colors? They are beyond me.”

“The sun must be back of you; the water near you—that is, you must be low down. Then the stone-tints of the river-bed are caught by the many changeful mirrors of the surface. It is, as you see, pretty well wave-broken here. Also, the general color is that of this yellow-red gravel slope opposite, mixed with the green of the trees.”

“Then,” said Anne, “it gets color—surface color—from within, and also from without, like one’s personality.”

“That is it, I see,” said Rose. “But the blue in the waves is so deep—deeper than the sky. It is intense indigo. More heavenly than heaven.”

271“Yes, that is so. It is because, as we partly face the current, you look into the concavities of thousands of waves, and each condenses, so to speak, the blue of large sky spaces. Am I clear?”

“‘Each nobler soul inherits heaven’s largeness,’” quoted Anne.

“Thanks, aunty. The greenish gold of the surface is the color of the bank, made also deeper in hue because of being caught on the myriad rippling of the water.”

“Good, my dear.”

“How beautiful it is!—the flashing cupfuls of blue in among this bloom of green and gold. No one could paint it.”

“It is best at evening, Rose, but not at this point. There is a place some miles up where the general surface is silvered by a mass of white or light-gray granite, and in this you have set again the numberless wave-shells of indigo-blue—a dance of blue in silver.”

“Isn’t that smoke getting very much thicker? The colors are less brilliant now.”

“Yes, ma’am. The wind blows it up the gorges. Happen might smell it.”

“I do,” said Anne. “One can hardly see the farther hills.”

“Some men,” said Lyndsay, “fancy that it affects the fishing unfavorably; but two years ago, on the Cascapedia, the water was so saturated with smoke as to be undrinkable, and still the fish rose well. I wanted to study with you again, Rose, the purple color of the dead trees above us; but this smoke will somewhat affect it.”

272“Let us get on to the beach, papa.” And in a moment they were seated on a log, Anne lying at ease beside them.

“It gets still more dense, Rose. We must give up the water. Sketch that sprawling dead pine yonder; it seems reeling back, and the one in front looks as if it had just hit it.”

“How droll, Archie!” said Anne. “May I talk, or will it disturb the higher art?”

“No. Talk as much as you like. No one could be cruel enough to deny you the safety-valve of talk.”

“If you had said no, I should have wanted to talk. I am now perversely inclined to silence.”

“It is a self-limited disease with you, Anne.”

“Thank you! I wa............