waving at her.

[19]

[20]

II THE PAINTER GETS A MODEL

Lake Wauchong is the crowning charm of that whole north New Jersey wilderness, rich though its variety is—watercourses hard to equal in sheer loveliness; lonely mountains from whose steeps look majesty and awe; stretches of stony desolation and of gloomy, bittern-haunted swamp that seem the fitting borderland of an inferno. At the southwestern end of the lake it receives the waters of a creek by way of a small cataract. In the spring, especially in the early spring, when there is most water on the cataract and when the foliage is at its freshest, most exquisite green, the early morning sunbeams make of that little corner of the lake a sort of essence and epitome of the lovely childhood of Nature.

Lake Wauchong

On the next morning but one after the adventure of the studio in the storm, Roger was industriously sketching in a view of this cataract, his canvas on an easel before which he was standing—he always stood at his work. Across his range of vision shot a canoe, a girl kneeling in it and wielding the paddle with expert[21] grace. He instantly recognized her. “Hello!” he called out friendlily—after a curiously agitated moment of confusion and recovery.

[21]

She turned her head, smiled. With a single skillful dip she rounded the canoe so that it shot to the shore within a few feet of where he stood. “Good morning, Chang,” said she. “Did you miss me at tea—or, rather, chocolate—yesterday?”

“I didn’t expect you,” replied he.

“You didn’t invite me.”

“That was ill-mannered, wasn’t, it? But, no—I forgot. We said good-by forever, didn’t we? Well, it was safer to prepare for the worst in a world as uncertain as this. Aren’t you rather early?”

She looked a little confused. “I’m very energetic for the first few days after I get to the country,” she explained. “Besides, I’m dreadfully restless of late.... Are you working?”

“I was.”

“Oh—I’m disturbing you.” She made a movement to push off. He smiled in a noncommittal way, but said nothing. She did not conceal her discontent with treatment of a kind to 

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