The sky was hazy, the air was hot. Weather-wise Berkshire folk would have prophesied a torrid spell, the more unbearable for the bracing cool of the region’s normal air. But the hot wave had merely sent this mildly tepid day as a herald.

To the lounging young folk in the garden it carried no message. Yet at whiles they fell silent as they drifted aimlessly about the grounds. There was a witchery that both found hard to ignore.

Rousing herself embarrassedly from one of these sweet silences, Doris nodded toward the big brown collie, who had come to a standstill in front of a puffy and warty old toad, fly-catching at the edge of a rock shelf.

The dog, strolling along in bored majesty in front of his human escorts, had caught the acrid scent of the toad and was crouching truculently in front of it, making little slapping gestures at the phlegmatic creature with his white forepaws and then bounding back, as if he feared it might turn and rend him.

[58]It was quite evident that Macduff regarded his encounter with that somnolent toad as one of the High Dramatic Moments of his career. Defiantly, yet with elaborate caution, he proceeded to harry it from a safe distance.

[58]

“What on earth makes him so silly?” asked Doris as she and Vail paused to watch the scene—the dog’s furry and fast-moving body taking up the entire narrow width of the path. “He must have seen a million toads, in his time.”

“What on earth made you cry, the evening we saw Bernhardt die, in Camille, when we were kids?” he countered, banteringly. “You knew she wasn’t really dead. You knew she’d get into her street clothes and scrub the ghastliness off her face and go out somewhere and eat a big supper. But you wept, very happily. And I had to give you my spare handkerchief. And it had a hole in it, I remember. I was hideously mortified. Every time I went to the theater with you, after that, I carried a stock of brand-new two-dollar handkerchiefs, to impress you. But you never cried, again, at a play. So that’s all the good they did me. Of course, the one time you cried, I had to be there with the last torn handkerchief I ever carried. Remember?”

“I remember I asked you why Mac is so silly[59] about that toad,” she reproved him, “and you mask your ignorance of natural history and of dog-psychology by changing the subject.”

[59]

“I did not!” 

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