caught it, and with an equal horror of both the nasty, wriggling things.
When they went a walk together, her notion of a healthful tramp was to
find a nice place among the sweet-fern or the pine-needles, and sit down
in it and talk, or make a lap, to which he could bring the berries he
gathered for her to arrange in the shallow leaf-trays she pinned
together with twigs. She really preferred a rocking-chair on the veranda
to anything else; but if he wished to go to those other excesses, she
would go with him, to keep him out of mischief.

There could be only one credible reading of the situation, but Alford
let the summer pass in this pleasant dreaming without waking up till too
late to the pleasanter reality. It will seem strange enough, but it is
true, that it was no part of his dream to fancy that Mrs. Yarrow was in
love with him. He knew very well, long before the end, that he was in
love with her; but, remaining in the dark otherwise, he considered only
himself in forbearing verbally to make love to her.

"Well!" Rulledge snarled at this point, "he _was_ a chump."

Wanhope at the moment opposed nothing directly to the censure, but said
that something pathetically reproachful in Mrs. Yarrow's smiling looks
penetrated to Alford as she nodded gayly from the car window to him in
the little group which had assembled to see her off at the station when
she left, by no means the first of their happy hotel circle to go.

"Somebody," Rulledge burst out again, "ought to have kicked him."

"What's become," Minver asked, "of all the dear maids and widows that
you've failed to marry at the end of each summer, Rulledge?"