It wasn't all discouragement. For now and then it seemed as if the swamp was going to have a shore of dry land. At such times Herring would exclaim:

"There you see! It had never been done before, and now it's been done, and we've done it."

And then it would seem to Phyllis as if a great weight of fear and anxiety had been lifted from her.

But the shore of the swamp always turned out to be an illusion. Once Herring, firmly situated as he believed, went suddenly through a crust of sphagnum moss and was immersed to the arm-pits. For some moments he struggled grimly to extricate himself, and only sank the deeper. Then he turned to Phyllis a face whimsical in spite of its gravity and pallor, and said: "If you have never saved a man's life, now is your chance. I'm afraid I can't get out without help."

It was then that her phenomenally strong little hands and wrists stood them both in good stead. The arches of her feet against a submerged root of white cedar, she so pulled and tugged, and exhorted Herring to struggle free, that at last he came out of that pocket quagmire and lay exhausted in the ooze at her feet.

He was incased from neck to foot in a smooth coating of brown slime. Presently he rolled over on his back and looked up at her.

"There you see!" he said. "You'd never saved a man's life before, and now you've done it. Please accept my sincere expressions of envy and gratitude— Why, you're crying!"

She was not only crying, but she was showing symptoms of incipient hysteria. "An old-fashioned girl," thought Herring, "like Great-grandmother Saltonstall." He raised himself to a sitting position just in time to slide an arm around her waist as, the hysteria now well under way, she sat down beside him and began to wave her hands up and down like a polite baby saying good-by to some one.

"One new thing under the sun after another," thought Herring. "Never had arm round hysterical girl's waist before. Got it there now. When you need her, she takes a good brace and pulls for all she's worth. When she needs you, she seats herself on six inches of water and yells. Just like Great-grandmother Saltonstall." Aloud he kept saying: "That's right! Greatest relief in the world! Go to it!" And his arm tightened about her with extraordinary tenderness.

Her hysterics ended as suddenly as they had begun. And then she wasted a valuable half-hour apologizing for having had them; Herring protesting all the while that he had enjoyed them just as much as she had, and that they had done him a world of good. And then they had to stop talking because their teeth began to chatter so hard that they simply couldn't keep on. Herring stuttered something about, "Exercise is what a body needs," and they rose to their feet and fought their way through a dense grove of arbor-vitÆ.

"The stealthy Indian goes through such places without making a sound," said Herring.

"Or getting his moccasins wet," said Phyllis. "Oh!" And she sank to the waist.

"Never mind," said Herring, "it will be dark before long. And when we have no choice of where to step, maybe we'll have better luck."

"It will have to be dark very soon," said Phyllis, "if we have any more of our clothes taken away from us by the brambles."

"That's a new idea!" exclaimed Herring. "Young couple starve to death in the woods because modesty forbids them to join their friends in the open. The head-line might be: 'Stripped by Brambles,' or 'The Two Bares.'"

He was so pleased with his joke that he had to lean against a tree. The laughing set him to coughing, and Phyllis beat him methodically between the shoulders.

Herring still refused to be serious. In helping Phyllis over the bad places, he performed prodigies of misapplied strength and made prodigious puns. And he said that never in his life had he been in such a delightful scrape.

Once, while they were resting, Phyllis said:

"All you seem to think of is the fun you're having. Most men would be thinking about the anxiety they were causing others and about the miseries of their companion."

"But," he protested, "you are enjoying yourself too. You don't think you are, but you are. It's your philosophy that is wrong. You like to live too much in the present. I like to lay by stores of delightful memories against rainy days. The worse you feel now, the more you'll enjoy remembering how you felt—some evening, soon—your back against soft cushions and the soles of your feet toward the fire."

"Ugh!" shuddered Phyllis. "Don't talk about fires. Oh, dear!"

"What's wrong now!"

"I'm so stiff I don't think I can take another step. We oughtn't to have rested so long."

But she did take another step, and would have fallen heavily if Herring had not caught her. A moment later she lost a shoe in the ooze, and wasted much precious daylight in vain efforts to locate and recover it.

"Sit down on that root," commanded Herring. And she obeyed. He knelt before her, lifted her wet, muddy little stockinged foot and set it on his knee.

"What size, please, miss?" he asked, giving an excellent imitation of a somewhat officious salesman.

"I don't know; I have them made," said Phyllis wearily, but trying her best to smile.

"Something in this style?" suggested Herring. He had secretly removed one of his own shoes, and handling it with a kind of comic reverence, as if the soggy, muddy thing was a precious work of art, he presented it to her attention.

And then Phyllis smiled without even trying and then laughed.

"I said a shoe," she said, "not a travelling bath-tub."

But he slipped that great shoe over her little foot, and so bound it to her ankle with his handkerchief and necktie that it promised to stay on.

"But you?" she said.

"Luck is with me to-day," said Herring. "Anybody can walk through an impassable swamp, but few are given the opportunity to hop. General Sherman should have thought of that. It would have showed the Confederates just what he thought of them if instead of marching through Georgia he had hopped."

And he pursued this new train of thought for some time. He improvised words to old tunes, and sang them at the top of his lungs: "As we were hopping through Georgia." And last and worst he sang: "There'll be a hop time in the old town to-night." And when he had occasion to address Phyllis directly, he no longer called her Miss Darling, but "Goody Two Shoes." He said that his own name was not Mr. Herring but Mr. Hopper, and that he was a famous cotillon leader.

But even he became a little quiet when the light began to fail, and a little serious.

"Whatever happens," he said, "it will be a great comfort to you to realize that it's entirely my fault. On the other hand, if we had gotten back into that boat, we might have been drowned long before this."

A little later Phyllis said: "I'm about all in. It's too dark to see. I——"

"Couldn't have chosen a better camping site myself," said Herring humbly. "First thing to think of is the water-supply—and fuel. Now, here the fuel grows right out of the water——"

"We haven't any matches."

"Yes, we have; but they are wet and won't light."

"We'll die of cold before morning," said Phyllis; "there's no use pretending we won't."

"On the contrary. Now is the time to pretend all sorts of things. Did you ever try to make a fire by rubbing two sticks together?"

"Never."

"Well, try it. It will make you warmer than the fire would. Afterward we will play 'Paddy cake, Paddy cake,' and 'Bean Porridge hot.'"

"Do men in danger always carry on the way you do?" asked Phyllis.

"Always," he answered.

"I can understand trying to be funny during a cavalry charge, or while falling off a cliff," said Phyllis, "but not while slowly and miserably congealing."

"You are not a Bostonian," said Herring. "Half the inhabitants of that municipality freeze to death and the others burn."

"I've stayed in Boston," said Phyllis, "and the only difference that I could see between it and other places was that the people were more agreeable and things were done in better taste. And what gardens!"

"Ever seen the Arboretum?"

"Have I?"

"In lilac time?"

"Mm!"

She was on her favorite topic. She forgot that she was cold, wet, miserable, and a frightful anxiety to her family.

"But why be an innkeeper?" asked Herring. "Why not set up as a landscape-gardener?"

"I don't know enough. But I've often thought——"

"I've got five hundred acres outside of Boston that I'd like to turn you loose on."

"You speak as if I were a goat."

"The first thing to do is to drain the swamps. Now, I'll make you a proposition. I can't put it in writing, because it's too dark to see and I have no writing materials, but there is nothing fishy about us Herrings. You to landscape my place for me, cause a suitable house to be built, and so forth; I to pay you a thousand dollars a month, and a five per cent commission on the total expenditure."

"And what might that amount to?"

"What you please," said Herring politely.

"Who says Bostonians are cold?" exclaimed Phyllis. And there began to float through her head lovely visions of landscapes of her own making.

"You're still joking, aren't you?" she said after a while.

"I don't know landscapes well enough to joke about them," he said.

"But I can't design a house!"

"Oh, you will have architects to do that part. You just pick the general type."

"What kind of a house do you want?"

"It depends on what kind of a house you want."

"Oh, dear," she exclaimed, "what fun it would be!"

"Will you do it?"

She was tempted beyond her strength.

"Yes," she said, and began to talk with irresponsible delight and enthusiasm.

"Ah," thought Herring to himself, "find out what really interests a girl and she'll forget all her troubles."

It began suddenly to grow light.

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Phyllis. "The woods must be on fire! Oh, the poor trees!"

"It isn't fire," said Herring, "it's the moon—'Queen and huntress, chaste and fair—goddess excellently bright'—was ever such luck! I hoped we were going to stand here cosily all night talking about marigolds and cowslips and wallpapers, and now it's our duty to move on. Come, Goody Two Shoes, Policeman Moon has told us to move on. I shall never forget this spot. And I shan't ever be able to find it again."

They toiled forward a little way, and lo! upon a sudden, they came to firm and rocky land that sloped abruptly upward from the swamp. They climbed for several hundred feet and came out upon a bare hilltop, from which could be seen billows of forest and one great horn of Half Moon Lake, silver in the moonlight.

"Why, it isn't a mile to camp," said Phyllis. She swayed a little, tottered, rocked backward and then forward, and fell against Herring's breast in a dead faint.

In a few moments she came to and found that she was being carried in strong arms. It was a novel, delicious, and restful sensation—one which it seemed immensely sensible to prolong. She did not, then, immediately open her eyes.

She heard a voice cheerful, but very much out of breath, murmuring over her:

"New experience. Never carried girl before. Experience worth repeating. Like 'em old-fashioned—like Great-grandmother Saltonstall. Like 'em to faint."

A few minutes later, "Where am I?" said Phyllis.

"In my arms," said Herring phlegmatically, as if that was one of her habitual residing places.

"Put me down, please."

"I hear," said he, "and I obey with extreme reluctance. I made a bet with myself that I could carry you all the way. And now I shall never know. Feel better?"

"Mm," she said, and "What a nuisance I've been all through! But it was pretty bad, some of it, wasn't it?"

"Already you are beginning to take pleasure in remembering. What did I tell you? Don't be frightened. I am going to shout."

He shouted in a voice of thunder, and before the echo came back to them another voice, loud and excited, rose in the forest. And they heard smashings and crashings, as a wild bull tearing through brittle bushes. And presently Sam Langham burst out of the thicket with a shower of twigs and pine-needles.

His delight was not to be measured in words. He apostrophized himself.

"Good old Sam!" he said. "He knew you weren't drowned in the brook. He knew it would be just like Herring to want to cross that swamp. As soon as I heard somebody say that it was impassable, I said: 'Where is the other side? That's the place to look for them.' But why didn't you make more noise?"

"Oh," said Herring, "we were so busy talking and exploring and doing things that had never been done before that it never occurred to us to shout."

"Herring," said Langham sternly, "you have the makings of a hero, but not, I am afraid, of a woodsman."

"Well, we're safe enough now," said Herring. "Excuse me a moment——"

"Excuse you! What?"

"It's very silly—been sick you know—over-exertion—think better faint and get it over with."

Langham knelt and lifted Herring's head.

"You lift his feet," he said to Phyllis, "send the blood to his heart; bring him to."

Herring began to come out of his faint.

"This young man," said Langham, "may be something of an ass, but he's got sand."

"He carried me a long way," said Phyllis, the tears racing down her cheeks; "and he's only just over typhoid, and he never stopped being cheerful and gallant, and he isn't an ass!"

Herring came to, but was not able to stand. He had kept up as long as he had to, and now there was no more strength in him.

Phyllis accepted the loan of Langham's coat.

"I'll stay with him," she said, "while you go for help."

The moment Langham's back was turned she spread the coat over Herring.

"Please—don't!" he said.

"You be quiet," said she sharply. "How do you feel?"

"Pretty well used up, thank you. Hope you'll 'scuse me for this collapse. Shan't happen again. Lucky thing you and I don't both collapse same moment."

A faint moan was wrung from him. She touched his cheek with her hand. It was hot as fire. She was an old-fashioned girl, and the instinct of nursing was strong in her.

She was an old-fashioned girl. There had almost always been a young man in her life about whom, for a while, she wove more or less intensely romantic fancies. They came; they went. But almost always there was one.

She raised her lovely face and looked at the moon, and made an unspoken confession. There had always been one. Well, now there was another!

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