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About The Sunday Oregonian. (Portland, Ore.) 1881-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 24, 1922)
TTTE SUNDAY OREGONTA1S", PORTIAXD, SEPTEMBER 24, 1922 3 Arthur Stringer MM1 a. W W ( M 4 It all started when Cosgrove set oat to arrest the girl whose turban was of forbidden herring gall plamage, topped off with a snowy egret. COSGRAVE first saw the snowy egret as he turned into Fifth ave nue at Thirty-third street. Nor was it the snowy egret alone that awakened his anger. The thing seemed doubly offensive because the wind-tossed white feathers cascaded about a small and slightly tiptilted turban most unmis takably made of herring gull's plumage. And both were interdicted; were illegal as hat ornaments. He had no knowledge as to who was wearing these forbidden decorations, but he had his own opinion of the woman who would deck herself out in such things. She was a violator of the law, an enemy of the precious wild life that her petty vanities had all but ex terminated. Yet so briskly did she walk up the early morning avenue that Philip Cos grave was compelled to follow her for three blocks before catching upwlth her. 'When he did so he tapped her on the arm, very much as a patrolman might She turned sharply at that unlooked-for affront and made her shoulder move ment away from him a perceptible One. But his stern eye was fixed on the snowy egret. "I suppose you know you're breaking the law In wearing those feathers," he proclaimed, noticing for the first time that the soft gray of the herring-gull plumage matched the soft gray of her eyes. "Would you be good enough to tell me about that lawT'she said, quite solemn ly. And Cosgrove explained to her the enactment of the migratory birds' con vention act, after which he told her, as graphically as he could, how the dorsal plumes of the American egret, the Ardea candidlssima, were plucked during the breeding season, and how such pot-hunting for the venal milliners had almost succeeded in exterminating one of the loveliest of the native herons. "You know, I never thought of that," she said, favoring him with, her first oblique glance of appraisal. "Too few of you do," snapped Cos erave, determined not to be sidetracked by any last-moment parade of humility. "You accuse me of cruelty, of unthink ing cruelty," the girl beside him was say ing. "But don't you think that deliber ate cruelty is quite as bad as the other kind? And you are being deliberately cruel with me." "My own feelings," he announced, "are rot important. The law exists, and you broke it." "And you insist on this public humilia tion?" she asked, without looking at him. "I insist that a law which I helped to frame should be respected," he main tained. And she nodded, comprehend ingly, after turning that statement over for a moment or two. "You must hate me very much," she said, with her meditative Mona Lisa smile. He resented that essentially feminine tendency to reduce everything to the per sonal. His one desire, he reminded him self, was to remain judicial. And he strove to sustain that pose by staring pointedly at her headgear as he re marked: "I am a member of the Audubon society." "Which means, I take it, that you love birds much more than you do human be ings," she suggested, not without bitter ness." "I'm afraid you will be quite unable to argue me out of what I've accepted as a matter of conscience," he announced to the Philistine in silken hosiery and serge beside him. The only soul she could claim, he began to feel, was that shining shell of one which she got every morning . from her milliner and her masseuse. "Oh, it's conscience!" she said, with a email hand gesture of enlightenment. And he flushed, in spite of himself, as she added: "That, of course, leaves it quite hopeless!" Yet, even as she spoke, she quickened her pace and stepped slightly ahead of him. Before he could fully realize the meaning of that maneuver she' stopped short before the approaching figure in the blue uniform. "Officer," she promptly . proclaimed, this man is annoying me." The opaque Celtic eye leisurely and none too approvingly inspected Cosgrave's person. Then it quite as leisurely and much more approvingly inspected the girl wearing the herring-gull turban. , "Do yuh know him?" inquired the po liceman. " "I never saw him before he accosted me here on the street," was her spirited reply. And Cosgrave winced perceptibly at the accosted. "Do yuh want him arrested?" inquired the officer. "I certainly do not want him annoying me," retorted the girl. . "Will yuh lay a charge?" insisted the arm of the law, with another none too flattering inspection of the man beside her. -. . Cosgrave, at that, felt that he had en dured about enough. ' "On the contrary, officer, I want this woman arrested!" "So yuh want her arrested?" re peated the still impassive Celtic giant. "And Just why should yuh be wantln' her arrested?" "For breaking the law in wearing those egret feathers on her hat," announced Cosgrave. Timothy McArthur, the officer, inspect ed the egret feathers. He did' so with a leisured approval which did not add to Cosgrave's peace of mind. "And how'm I t'know them's eaglet feathers?" inquired the large-bodied, man in blue. "Egret," corrected Cosgrave. "Well, whatever yuh call 'em, they suit the lady fine, to my way o' thinkin'! They may be eaglet feathers and they may be rooster feathers. But yuh've got a divil of a lot to do, you big amad haun, wanderin' around and pokin' your long nose into what a gerri's wearin' on her head. ' Yuh'd better be gettin back to the millinery department. I don't care who yuh are or what yuh are. Yuh be on your way. And if yuh speak to this gerrl again I'll gather yuh in so quick yuh won't know an eaglet feather from the tail of a Cochin-China!" The one thing Cosgrave noticed was that the oval face under the herring-gull turban was wearing the softest of smiles. "We'll meet again, perhaps," she said, over his shoulder. "I hope that never happens," retorted Cosgrave, with a glance at the night stick of the intervening Celtic giant, im placable as fate, pointing in a direction opposite to that which the girl in the snowy egret was taking. But Cosgrave and the snowy egret girl did meet again. They met quite "unex pectedly on the second evening after his lecture on "The Gulf Bird Sanctuaries," when he was dining at the Wolcotts'. He was unaware of her presence there until a footman going from group to chattering, group, passed around the cocktails. She turned to him suddenly as he took a diffident sip of the amber mix ture which meant so little to him. "Doesn't your conscience trouble you?" she demanded, with an accusatory eye on the glass in his hand. "Why should it?" he asked, noticing that she' was looking lovelier than ever in her dinner gown of nasturtium red. But there was no mistaking the enmity behind her pose of levity. "Don't you know that you are breaking one Of the laws of this land?" she magis terially inquired. "I never thought much about it," he retorted as he put down his glass. "But there are - so many who never think much about it," she pointed out with , mopk solemnity. He was able to laugh a little, but he could see that she was still intent on making him seem ridiculous. "Few of us are perfect," he observed, though he was wondering at the time why nothing stood so devastating as the scorn of a beautiful woman. "Yet so many of us demand perfection in others," she proclaimed.' She said it light-heartedly enough, but he was not unaware of the saber sheathed in rose leaves. He stood studying her face with an impersonal intentness which brought the faintest touch of color into her cheek. ., "I fancy it's going to be hard for us to be friends," she observed with her discounting small smile. "I rather imagine it's going to be quite Impossible," he found the bru tality to retort. , He was sorry, the next moment, that he had said it, and he was still sorrier when, a few minutes later, he found himself confronted by the lugubrious - pleasure of taking her to dinner. "It's a small world, isn't it?" she ob served toward the end of a dinner which could still show perversely pleasant mo ments to him. "Especially to the evil doer!" He asked her why she said that. "Because I've discovered that it's on Lake Trevor you have your bird sanctu ary. And I find that I'm to spend a month with the Wolcotts almost side by side with-it." . "I shudder to think of the conse quences!" He was able, however, to smile as he said it. "Your fears, I feel, are quite ground less," she countered with her quiet smile. "I intend, in fact, to find out a great deal about bird life." "I trust it will change your point of view," he remarked,'" wondering why she should sit studying him with such a meek and meditative eye. Yet bis sense of triumph in scoring against a once too open-handed enemy was not as enduring 8,5 it might have been. For a few min utes later he had the dubious pleasure of hearing her recite to a youth whom she addressed as "Kennie" the lines of a new song which she lightly asked him to set to music. - , "It ends up, Kennie, something like this: " 'Remember, gentle neighbors, then, 'Tis wrong to tease the bat; Embrace the badger in his den, Be friendly with the rat. And love the little birdies when They love you, tit for tat; And never pluck the Jenny-wren To decorate your hat!'" Cosgrave turned slowly about and looked at the girl with the flushed cheek It seemed strange that he could both despise her and admire her in the same breath. "Your poem,";, he solemnly informed her, "is much prettier than the motive which inspired it." She merely shrugged a slender shoul der under its slender metaled strap. "MotiYes," she casually remarked, "are so terribly hard to fathom!" Cosgrave, with the advance of spring, found himself an unexpectedly busy man. He was hot so preoccupied, how ever, that he failed to note when the. over-laborate "camp" of the Wolcotts was opened for the vacation season. Nor was his trained sharpness of vision alto gether unconscious of the arrival of an alert bodied young lady, who in rather resplendent sweaters and peg-top breeches went paddling and tramping and angling about his beloved demesne. She hal looed to him once, across the bay, and he quite solemnly hallooed back to her. So when he came face to face with her, while fungus hunting, in a bit of woods on the mainland, she seemed reprovingly reserved in her manner and he went on his way again, oppressed with a vague sense of disappointment. It was when returning from an in vestigation of certain depredations that he unexpectedly encountered Caroma Reeder. He found her beside his hilltop trail, huddled against a rock. He stopped short, disturbed by the quiescence of that customarily active figure. "Are you hurt?" he asked. "I'm afraid I've sprained my ankle," she replied with her fingers clasped about one of her high-laced tan brogans. He knelt down beside her and examined the injured foot. She winced as he pressed on the leather-covered ankle. "I'm afraid we'll have to get this shoe off," he announced, and he proceeded to unlace it. And he noticed that she winced again as he carefully worked her foot out of the shoe. "Now the stocking," he proclaimed. But she demurred at that. "It hurts too much," she objected, col oring a trifle. So he re-examined the ankle through its ribbed woolen stocking. He could de tect nothing alarming in Its conditions. There was no swelling that he could see, and there were obviously no broken bones, though she ventured a little cry or two of pain as his strong fingers ex plored the Injured area, "Can you walk?" asked Cosgrave, looking for the first time directly into her face. It Impressed him as a singu larly appealing face, with Its misty gray eyes and its turkey-spotted small nose and its mobile red mouth with just a trace of willfulness about the curving line of the lips. The girl shook her head in negation. "I tried," she acknowledged. "But I couldn't quite manage it." "Shall we try again?" he asked, quite impersonally. "All right," she agreed, with no great parade of hopefulness. They Bad considerable trouble in get ting the shoe on again. It was Cosgrave who laced it up, re peatedly asking if he was making It too tight. And it was Cosgrave who helped her to her feet and supported her with one stalwart arm while she essayed a none too promising effort to hobble along at his side. "It's no use," she said, sitting down on a stone and nursing the injured ankle between her clasped fingers. "I think you'd better leave me here." "And then what?" he asked. "You might send somebody up from the Wolcotts to come and get me," she suggested, adding, with unlooked - for meekness: "If you will be so kind." Cosgrave laughed. "I imagine I can manage you as well as anybody from the Wolcott house," he announced. He carried her "pick-a-back," with the weight of her boby resting along his spine and her arms clasped about his neck and his own hands linked under her knees. It was, she supposed, a sensible and com fortable way of carrying people. But it began to impress her as deplorably lack ing in dignity. "Would you mind letting me down a moment?" she said in a somewhat stifled tone of voice as they emerged from the wooded higher land and came within sight of the Wblcott lodge. He did as she' asked. He let her down as casually as though she were a child grown tired of a gambol. But his eyes were solemn as he studied her somewhat flushed face. "I think I can manage by myself for the rest of the way," she found the cour age to suggest. . But Cosgrave would not hear of it. "You're tired, of course," he admitted. "So this time we'll try another position." "But it's you who must be tired," she protested.1 "Not a bit of it," he stoutly asserted. "So take hold, and I'll have you home in ten minutes.". . The "taking hold," she found, consisted in being compelled to wrap one arm close ly about his neck, for this time he was carrying her in his arms. And in this way he carried be right to the wide veranda of the Wolcott lodge, which he mounted with his silent and slightly flushed burden amid a small chorus of ejaculations from the assembled com pany. Cosgrave maae it a point to Ignore those jubilant and slightly derisive cries. The one person he found it hard to for give, however, was the knickerbockered youth with a languid smile who clicked a camera as Caroma Reeder came up the steps in bis arms. That, Cosgrave felt, was going a bit too 'far. "No, it's nothing serious," he solemn ly assured Mrs Wolcott. "It's merely that Miss Reeder has sprained her ankle. As you see, she's not able to walk. So I'll send Doctor Angus ov.er as soon as I can get in touch with him. I've found him a very dependable physician'." Then Cosgrave turned to the young man with the camera. "I'd prefer," he announced with un expected spirit, "not perpetuating the ridiculous." Whereupon he violently took possession of the camera, flung it to the floor, and crushed Jt with his heel. It was a week later, when Cosgrave and Doctor Angus were fishing for rainbow trout in the back hills, that the man of medicine was prompted to comment on the case. "Say, Phil, I'm afraid they've got the laugh on you down at the Wolcott cot tage," he observed as he bent over a book of flies. Cosgrove, without looking up, inquired as to the reason for this. "You remember that city girl with the sprained ankle I went down to see?" "Yes, I rather remember her," acknowl edged , Cosgrave. "Well, there was nothing more wrong with her foot than there is with mine." "You mean she could have. walked if 6he wanted to?" asked Cosgrave, with deepening color. The doctor nodded as he threaded a coachman. "I may be wrong, but I've got a lurk ing suspicion she laid a bet she'd make you carry her in." - Cosgrave sat thinking this over. "Well, I carried her in," he finally said. - "For about a mile and three-quarters, as I figure it out," commented the other, with just the ghost of a smile. "I don't regret it," announced Cos grave out of a second long silence. "I shouldn't think you would," ob served Angus with a tug at his wader straps. . "She Impressed me as some thing pretty easy to look at." "What, do you mean by that?" de manded the solemn-eyed Cosgrave. "I suppose I mean that she's an ex traordinarily attractive young woman," said the man of medicine, who was left wondering why his companion of the reel should remain so morosely silent for the rest of the afternoon. Pfiillp Cosgrave wakened up to the fact that something was wrong with him. He was moody and abstracted and found little interest in his work. He also found himself thinking about Caroma Reeder a great deal more than he cared to ac knowledge. And he ended up by assert ing that he had no wish to see a person who had done her .best to make him ridiculous. Yet his customarily steady pulse quick ened a little when he caught sight of her, one warm and limpid evening, on the sloping, sandy shore of Lake Trovor. She was sitting on a many-antlered pine root, as motionless as a beach bird, watching the sunset. And she merely smiled her Mona-Llsa smile as he came and stood before her. "I've a confession to make," she said, after a moment of silence. "I don't want to hear it," he told her, almost roughly. "But I think you ought to know it," she asserted, with her eyes on the black fringe of the pines that brought the sun set closer. ' "Ought to know what?" he asked, with an involuntary glance down at her saddle back shoes. "That I've contributed $560 to the new bird sanctuary fund," . she quickly an nounced. "What prompted you to do that?" he inquired. "You did," she acknowledged, turning her face, to him. It impressed him as a singularly lovely face. And it also im pressed him as an honest one at the mo ment. But he studied it long and ernestly, apparently in search of: some trace of guile. "I see you still don't approve of me," she finally asserted. "It's your dfiferent efforts to make me appear as ridiculous as possible that I don't approve of," he amended. "I'm sorry," she said with her barri caded smile. "Why?" he demanded.. 'Because I really wanted to know more about these things you're so interested in. I had no chance before of under standing." Then she added, with Just a touch of color in her cheeks: "The saints, you know, are only the sinners who kept on trying." He sat down on the sand in front of her. "I wonder if you'd actually let me teach you a few of the things I've learned about nature?" he questioned. The twi light was depening slowly about them, and from far out toward Thor island a bittern cried. "Would you?" she asked, yith her solemn gray eyes on his face. He stared back at her for a full min ute of silence. "On one condition," he said, with quite unlooked for grlmness, as he rose to his teet. "What is that?" she asked, following his movement. "That you marry me!" was hia abrupt declaration. And that ultimatum seemed to surprise him almost as much as it must have surprised thye young woman confronting him. It became, in fact, her turn to remain Bilent for a disturbingly prolonged space of time. "I'm sorry you said that," she finally observed. "Why?" he inquired. "Because that's something which Ken neth Fillmore has Just asked me to do!" He felt that the bottom had dropped cut of his world. But he did his best to bear up. "Who's Kenneth Fillmore?" he de manded. "That's the man whose camera you smashed up the other day." she casually explained. "Then I wish I'd smashed more than the camera," he retorted, though he laughed a little as he said it "And are you going to marry him?" "That was what I was thinking about as I sat here. Kenneth, you see. doesn't take life very seriously." "While I rather imagine you'd accuse me of taking it too seriously." he prompted. She laughed, but her gray eyes were as sober as the light above the black fringed pinelands. "I'm afraid we've made a very bad be ginning," she ventured. "Then we ought to work hard for a better ending," he valorously informed her. ' Her Sigh was an audible one. "I'm afraid," she observed, "we still don't understand each other." "But I want to understand you," he found courage to say. "I imagine law-breakers would never greatly appeal to you!" He winced at that. But the mere fact that he could smile seemed to imply that she had already shaken a little of the solemnity out of him. "I break a few myself," he countered. And she rewarded him at that with a smile. It was plain to see that he was getting on a bit. . "But if I told you I was already en gaged to Kenneth Fillmore what would you do?" "I'd be very sorry," he replied. "Is that all?" "What else. could I do?" he demanded. "I'm afraid," she said, and her sigh this time was an inaudible one, "that you're much better at hunting Dims man human beings." He couldn't quite catch the drift of her thought. But her allusion to bird hunt ing brought his none - too - happy mind back to what she had already said about studying nature with him. And he asked her, meekly enough, if he couldn't hope for at least one day with her in the open. She found it necessary to give this con siderable thought. "Yes," she finally agreed. "You can take me canoeing tomorrow afternoon if you care to." Cosgrave did not sleep well that, night. He had too much to think about. What slowly but surely assumed the aspects of the great hour of his life seemed- too close. That 'he did long to win Caroma Reeder's confidence became only too self evident as he made her comfortable in the bpvr of his slender-bodied Rice Lake canoe and pushed off 'from shore. But it was more than her confidence he wanted, he realized as he headed lor Thor island, lying low on the wind - riffled water, a good seven miles away. He knew that be wanted the woman herself. "I think I like you best this way," she said as she watched his sinewed brown - arms send the tilted canoe along the hooker green surface of the lake. "Why?" he asked as he noted the odd mixture of gold and mahogany in her hair. "Because you look masterful," she told him. "And women like masterful men." That, like so many of her little speeches, gave him a great deal to think about. If also revived in him the im pulse to keep on paddling into the ever receding distances. But Instead of doing so they landed on the desolation of Thor Island, where he beached the canoe and lifted out the carefully packed supper things, after which he took her scrambling over rocks and briars and reedy swales and showed her one of his precious wood duck nests She knelt beside him as he lifted away the screening litter of sticks and twigs and showed her the protective down plucked from the mother bird's breast and the warm eggs beneath it, explaining how that covering of down could keep the eggs from chilling for a whole day, if need be, should the mother duck be driven away from her nest. And they wandered about the desolate little island until the sun began to slope down towards the west and Cosgrave awakened to the much more desolate discovery that his day was slipping away. So he found a sheltered spot and gath ered what wood he could and left her to feed the fire while he went back to the canoe for the supper things. He went with a heavy heart, glancing morosely back at the vital young figure bent over the smoking campfire. He walked dourly and deliberately to the little cove where the canoe had been beached, stopping still again to look back and making note of the fact that the girl's 6tooplng body was no longer In sight Then, after a moment of grim silence, he did an unaccountable and an Inexcusable thing. He slid the canoe slowly down into the water, let it float there for a second or two, and pushed it out on the lake. There was a grlmness to the set of hU jaw as he rejoined Caroma beside the fire. His silence, in fact, caused her to look up and sweep him with a quick glance of in terrogation. "What's wrong?" she asked. "Why?" he temporized as he turned to put more wood on the fire. "You look so solemn," she light-heartedly affirmed. "I've Just discovered how hungry I am," he equivocated as he fell to work preparing supper. An odd spirit of hilarity seemed to overtake Caroma during that meal in the waning evening light.- She appeared waywardly youthful and carefree, im pressing the brooding-eyed Cosgrave as very much like a child intent on getting the most out of her holiday. He tried not to think of the future, but he was not of the breed that can live its moment alone. 'Yet he wished, above all things, that the clock of the world would stop. The clock of the world, however, does not stop at the wish of mere mortals. Even the girl looked up, eventually, from the narcotizing glow of the embers, with a glance about at the gathering dusk. "Don't you think we ought to be start ing back?" she asked out of the silence which had fallen over them. He sat studying her face. "Supposing we don't go back?" he sug gested, more solemnly than he had in tended. She looked up at him and laughed. And he found something fortifying in her matter-of-factness. "I'm afraid we haven't any choice in .the matter," she asserted. "No, we haven't much choice in the matter," he repeated as he watched her rise to her feet. "There are certain rules of the game, of course, that have to be observed," ex plained the girl as she busied herself in gathering np the camp outfit. "Laws that mustn't be broken?" he supplemented, as he, too, rose tardily to his feet. "Or some solemn-eyed person will be stepping up to remind us that we've broken them," she was Inconsiderate enough to assert. She stopped suddenly and looked down at the sand, where the mark of the canoe keel was still discernible. Then she glanced about the shallow cove. "Where's our boat?" she asked, with her eyes directly on Cosgrave's face. Instead of returning that gaze he pre ferred looking out over the darkening lake water. "It's gone," he announced. "But how could it go?" she asked, much more quietly than he had expected. "It must have got adrift and blown away in this offshore breeze," he told her. She was silent a moment "Have we any other way of getting back?" "None whatever," he was compelled to acknowledge. "Then what can we do?" she de manded. "We'll have' to wait here until some body comes and takes us oft." "I told Kennie I was coming here," she finally said. "But they'd never think of looking for us until morning. And then it would be too' late!" "Too late for what?" asked the man at her side. And the girl's laugh was a slightly acidulated one. "For our good friend Mrs. Grundy," she explained. "I thought that lady belonged to the Victorian era," he contendedj "On the contrary, she still moves In the very best circles. And the better the circle the more terrible you'll find her disapproval." "What does that mean?" "It means I'm lost," was her dolorous reply. "Lost to what?" She preferred apparently not answer ing that question. And Cosgrave began to see that the situation wasn't so simple as he had imagined. "I can swim for it If yon want me to," he told her. "How far is It?" she asked. "It's seven miles to the nearest main land. I think I could make it in a cou ple of hours'." She looked at the water and turned away with what he thought was a shud der. "No, no; you mustn't do that! Some thing might happen!" "Would you care?" he asked. And for the second time she left one of his ques tions unanswered. "I suppose we could try a signal fire?" she finally suggested. "Yes, we could do that. But I don't Imagine they'd understand." "No, I don't Imagine they'll under stand," she admitted as she sat down on the sand. 'He unfolded the waterproofed camp blanket and draped it about ber shoulders. More than ever she Impressed him as something infinitely fragile, as something infinitely fragile betrayed into his hands unworthily rough. "What are we going to do?" she aked, staring at him through the uncertain light. "We're going to stay here." he pro claimed. "No, no; I don't mean that," she cor rected. "I mean afterward." "I'm afraid you'll have to marry me," he announced, as Impersonally as he was able. He waited for her to speak, scarcely breathing. "Because the situation demands ex planation?" she quietly inquired. "No; because I want you so much," he Just as quietly told her. "How much?" she asked. "More than I can ever tell you," be said. She started to laugh, but It ended in a sigh. "Im afraid you're only trying to make the best of a bad bargain," she pro tested. "I don't care what it is so long as If brings me you!" "But how about my feelings?" she de manded with unlooked-for bplrlf . "Let's not talk about it now," he pro tested, as be reached for his belt ratchet. "I think we ought to go back to the fire, where I can make you comfortable." "I'm afraid that's out of the question tonight!" But she let him lead her back by the hand to where their bed of embers still lay. He left her there and groped his way out to the upper end of the island, where the scrub growth was a trifle heavier. It took him some time to cut enough branches for a wlndbrake and a' bed. When he returned to the fire he found the girl kneeling before it, watch ing the flames. Her silence filled him with a vague trouble. "You must be tired," he suggested, as he placed the canoe cushions on the bed of evergreens for her. "I was never more wide awake in my life." "But I want you to wrap up and keep warm," he told her, conscious of the sharpening tang in that upland night air. "All right," she said, with consolatory matter-of-factness. She stood docile as he wrapped her up, mummylike, in his camp blanket. She remained equally Impassive as be picked her up and carried her to the wind-break and adjusted the'cushlon for hrr bad. "You're not going away?" she said, sit-' ting up and leaning on her elbow, a mo ment later. For he had retreated to the far side of the bed of coals. "I'll stay np and keep the fire going," he explained. "That doesn't seem fair," she pro tested. He added fresh fuel to tho coals be fore be spoke. "There's only one thing that keeps this from being the happiest night of my life," he told her, as he sat down with the fire between them. "What Is that one thing?" she asked, staring up at the star-spangled vault of heaven. "The thought that it's the only night we may ever have like this," he replied. "Do yon mind if I smoke?" "Of course not," she said in a slightly flattened voice. . He filled his pipe and struck a match. "Which are the Pleiades?" she asked, ont of the silence that had fallen over them. He pointed them out to her with his pipe stem. She stared up at them for a long time. "Are yon comfortable?" he finally asked. "It's heavenly," she said with a small sight of contentment. "And you're not not altogether sorry?" "Are you?" His face was unduly solemn. "Yes." he said at last. "Why?" she asked. "Because I have something on my con science." "I can't Imagine yon doing anything very bad," she said after a moment of silence. "But I did do it." he asserted. "When?" "Today!" "I'd rather not talk about It." she sur prised him by saying. "But I want you to know." "What is that big star going down in the west?" she quietly interposed. He told her that It was Venus. "And is that Orion, almost over our heads?" ' He acknowledged that It was. "And those lights along the water?" (Concluded a Xw J