He nodded away the obligation. Then the train started, and Leslie turned back toward his launch.

A feeling of great and wholly unexpected tenderness came upon Louise. She leaned far out of the car window to wave. He looked back, saw her, and waved also; then sauntered coolly on toward the dock.

[Pg 48]

[Pg 48]

4

When Louise and Leslie walked together through the forest of Betsey they had not as a matter of fact passed entirely unobserved.

Hilda, after her sister had gone downstairs, didn't remain long in bed. Right on the heels of that cloudy fear lest Mr. Barry fail to arrive and Louise's heart be a second time broken, there flashed, for Hilda, a fine little campaign in her own behalf. Hilda's education in the great school of love was already quite well launched. Of course she was as yet graded rather intermediately. But Hilda was an alert and ambitious young student. She told herself it would be very much worth while to observe how an engaged lady behaved in the company of other men. Louise was a pattern for her in so many ways—both papa and mama kept insisting. Why not in this also? She might very possibly have need of the lesson some day. However, the real, specific, if not exactly admitted impulse behind her nimble relinquishment of bed was the plain desire just to see Leslie.

It did not take Hilda long to dress. For one thing, of course, she dressed very simply up here in the[Pg 49] wilderness. Louise dressed simply also, but not so simply as Hilda. However, there was a reason for this—a reason of which Hilda was fully cognisant, and one to which she was perforce reconciled. Age made all the difference in the world. She consoled herself with enormous bows on her jumpers, but also with the promise that there would come a day when she, too, would dress less simply, even in the wilderness.

[Pg 49]

Hilda was listening at the head of the stairs when her sister went up to the "tea-house" to summon Leslie. While the lower part of the cottage was thus momentarily vacant, the girl stole down, making comical faces of deprecatory concern at each separate creak. Then she sped quickly out of the house and off through the thicket in a direction oblique with the path which Louise and Leslie 

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