the result was nothing better than a camper's bed of broken pine twigs sheltered and housed in by a sort of bower built from such tree branches as he could break off by main strength.

[Pg 24]

The young woman did not withhold her meed of praise, especially after she had seen his blistered hands, which were also well daubed with pitch from the pines.

"It's a shame!" she said. "I ought not to have let you work so hard. If it should happen to rain, you'd need the shelter much more than I should."

"Why do you say that?"

"You don't look so very fit," was the calm reply; "and I am fit. Do you know, my one ambition, as a little girl, was to grow up and be an acrobat in a circus?"

"And yet you landed in the laboratory of a girls' school," he laughed.

[Pg 25] "Not exclusively," she countered quickly. "Last year I was also an assistant in the gymnasium. Swimming was my specialty, but I taught other things as well."

[Pg 25]

Prime laughed again. "And I can't swim a single stroke," he confessed. "Isn't that a humiliating admission on the part of a man who has lived the greater part of his life in sight of the ocean?"

Miss Millington said she thought it was, and in such gladsome fashion the evening wore away. When it came time to sleep, the lately risen moon lighted the young woman to her bower; and Prime, replenishing the fire, made his bed in the sand, the unwonted exertions of the day and evening putting him to sleep before he had fairly fitted himself to the inequalities of his burrow below the tree roots.

[Pg 26]

[Pg 26]

III

SENSIBLE SHOES

The dawn of the second morning was much like that of the first, cool and crystal clear, and with the sun beating out a pathway of molten gold across the mirror-like surface of the solitary lake.

The

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