Early the next morning Colonel Meredith and his cousin Bob Jonstone presented themselves at the office dressed for walking. Butter would not have melted in their mouths.

"Can you come now and help us pick out a site for the tent?" asked the youthful colonel.

Maud was rather busy that morning, but she closed her ledger, selected a walking-stick, and smiled her willingness to aid them.

"It will seem more like real camping-out," said Mr. Jonstone, "if we don't pitch our tent right in the midst of things. Suppose we take a boat and row along the shores of the lake, keeping our eyes peeled."

Maud was not averse to going for a row with two handsome and agreeable young men. They selected a guide boat and insisted on helping her in and cautioning her about sitting in the middle. Maud had almost literally been brought up in a guide boat, but she only smiled discreetly. The cousins matched for places. As Maud sat in the stern with a paddle for steering, Colonel Meredith, who won the toss, elected to row stroke. Bob Jonstone climbed with gingerness and melancholy into the bow. Not only was he a long way from that beautiful girl, but Meredith's head and shoulders almost completely blanketed his view of her.

"We ought to row English style," he said.

"What is English style, and why ought we to row that way?"

"In the American shells," explained Jonstone, "the men sit in the middle. In the English shells each man sits as far from his rowlock as possible."

"Why?" asked Meredith, who understood his cousin's predicament perfectly.

"So's to get more leverage," explained Jonstone darkly.

"It's for Miss Darling to say," said Meredith. "Which style do you prefer, Miss Darling, English or American?"

"I think the American will be more comfortable for you both and safer for us all," said she.

"There!" exclaimed the man of war, "what did I tell you?"

"But—" continued Maud.

"I could have told you there would be a 'but,'" interrupted Jonstone triumphantly.

"But," repeated Maud, "I'm coxswain, and I want to see what every man in my boat is doing."

So they rowed English style.

"It's like a dinner-party," explained Maud to Colonel Meredith, who appeared slightly discomforted. "Don't you know how annoying it is when there's a tall centrepiece and you can't see who's across the table from you?"

"Even if you don't want to look at him when you have found out who he is," agreed Meredith. "Exactly."

They came to a bold headland of granite crowned with a half-dozen old pines that leaned waterward.

"That's rather a wonderful site, I think," said Maud.

"Where?" said the gentlemen, turning to look over their shoulders. Then, "It looks well enough from the water," said Jonstone, "but we ought not to choose wildly."

"Let us land," said Colonel Meredith, "and explore."

They landed and began at once to find reasons for pitching the tent on the promontory and reasons for not pitching it.

"The site is open and airy," said Jonstone.

"It is," said Colonel Meredith. "But, in case of a southwest gale, our tent would be blown inside out."

A moment later, "How about drinking-water?" asked the experienced military man.

"I regret to say that I have just stepped into a likely spring," said Jonstone.

"We must sit down and wait till it clears."

When the spring once more bubbled clean and undefiled Mr. Jonstone scooped up two palmfuls of water and drank.

"Delicious!" he cried.

Colonel Meredith then sampled the spring and shook his head darkly.

"This spring has a main attribute of drinking-water," he said; "it is wet. Otherwise——"

"What's the matter with my spring?" demanded his cousin.

"Silica, my dear fellow—silica. And you know very well that silica to a man of your inherited tendencies spells gout."

Jonstone nodded gravely.

"I'm afraid that settles it." And he turned to Maud Darling. "I can keep clear of gout," he explained, "only just as long as I keep my system free from silica."

"Do you usually manage to?" asked Maud, very much puzzled.

"So far," he said, "I have always managed to."

"Then you have never suffered from gout?"

"Never. But now, having drunk at this spring, I have reason to fear the worst. It will take at least a week to get that one drink out of my system."

And so they passed from the promontory with the pine-trees to a little cove with a sandy beach, from this to a wooded island not much bigger than a tennis-court. In every suggested site Jonstone found multitudinous charms and advantages, while Colonel Meredith, from the depths of his military experience, produced objections of the first water. For to be as long as possible in the company of that beautiful girl was the end which both sought.

Maud had gone upon the expedition in good faith, but when its true object dawned upon her she was not in the least displeased. The very obvious worship which the Carolinians had for her beauty was not so personal as to make her uncomfortable. It was rather the worship of two artists for art itself than for a particular masterpiece. Of the six beautiful Darlings Maud had had the least experience of young men. She was given to fits of shyness which passed with some as reserve, with others as a kind of common-sense and matter-of-fact way of looking at life. The triplets, young as they were, surpassed the other three in conquests and experience. And this was not because they were more lovely and more charming but because they had been a little spoiled by their father and brought into the limelight before their time. Furthermore, with the exception of Phyllis, perhaps, they were maidens of action to whom there was no recourse in books or reflection. Such accomplishments as drawing and music had not been forced upon them. They could not have made a living teaching school. But Lee and Gay certainly could have taught the young idea how to shoot, how to throw a fly, and how to come in out of the wet when no house was handy. As for Phyllis, she would have been as like them as one pea is like two others but for the fact that at the age of two she had succeeded in letting off a 45-90 rifle which some fool had left about loaded and had thereby frightened her early sporting promises to death. But it was only of weapons, squirming fish, boats, and thunder storms that she was shy. Young gentlemen had no terrors for her, and she preferred the stupidest of these to the cleverest of books.

Mary, Maud, and Eve had wasted a great part of their young lives upon education. They could play the piano pretty well (you couldn't tell which was playing); they sang charmingly; they knew French and German; they could spell English, and even speak it correctly, a power which they had sometimes found occasion to exercise when in the company of foreign diplomatists. The change in their case from girlhood to young womanhood had been sudden and prearranged: in each case a tremendous ball upon a given date. The triplets had never "come out."

If Lee or Gay had been the victim of the present conspiracy, the gentlemen from Carolina would have found their hands full and overflowing. They would have been teased and misconstrued within an inch of their lives; but Maud Darling was genuinely moved by the candor and chivalry of their combined attentions. There was a genuine joyousness in her heart, and she did not care whether they got her home in time for lunch or not. And it was only a strong sense of duty which caused her to point out the high position attained by the sun in the heavens.

With reluctance the trio gave up the hopeless search for a camp site and started for home upon a long diagonal across the lake. It was just then, as if a signal had been given, that the whole surface of the lake became ruffled as when a piece of blue velvet is rubbed the wrong way, and a strong wind began to blow in Maud's face and upon the backs of the rowers.

Several hours of steady rowing had had its effect upon unaccustomed hands. It was now necessary to pull strongly, and blisters grew swiftly from small beginnings and burst in the palms of the Carolinians. Maud came to their rescue with her steering paddle, but the wind, bent upon having sport with them, sounded a higher note, and the guide boat no longer seemed quick to the least propulsion and light on the water, but as if blunt forward, high to the winds, and half full of stones. She did not run between strokes but came to dead stops, and sometimes, during strong gusts, actually appeared to lose ground.

The surface of the lake didn't as yet testify truly to the full strength of the wind. But soon the little waves grew taller, the intervals between them wider, and their crests began to be blown from them in white spray. The heavens darkened more and more, and to the northeast the sky-line was gradually blotted out as if by soft gray smoke.

"We're going to have rain," said Maud, "and we're going to have fog. So we'd better hurry a little."

"Hurry?" thought the Carolinians sadly. And they redoubled their efforts, with the result that they began to catch crabs.

"Some one ought to see us and send a launch," said Maud.

At that moment, as the wind flattens a field of wheat to the ground, the waves bent and lay down before a veritable blast of black rain. It would have taken more than human strength to hold the guide boat to her course. Maud paddled desperately for a quarter of a minute and gave up. The boat swung sharply on her keel, rocked dangerously, and, once more light and sentient, a creature of life, made off bounding before the gale.

"We are very sorry," said the Carolinians, "but the skin is all off our hands, and at the best we are indifferent boatmen."

"The point is this," said Maud: "Can you swim?"

"I can," said Colonel Meredith, "but I am extremely sorry to confess that my cousin's aquatic education has been neglected. Where he lives every pool contains crocodiles, leeches, snapping-turtles, and water-moccasins, and the incentive to bathing for pleasure is slight."

"Don't worry about me," said Mr. Jonstone. "I can cling to the boat until the millennium."

"We shan't upset—probably," said Maud. "It will be better if you two sit in the bottom of the boat. I'll try to steer and hold her steady. This isn't the first time I've been blown off shore and then on shore. I suppose I ought to apologize for the weather, but it really isn't my fault. Who would have thought this morning that we were in for a storm?"

"If only you don't mind," said Colonel Meredith. "It's all our fault. You probably didn't want to come. You just came to be friendly and kind, and now you are hungry and wet to the skin——"

"But," interrupted Bob Jonstone, "if only you will forget all that and think what pleasure we are having."

"I can't hear what you say," called Maud.

"I beg your pardon," shouted Mr. Jonstone. "I didn't quite catch that. What did Miss Darling say, Mel?"

"She said she wanted to talk to me and for you to shut up."

Mr. Jonstone made a playful but powerful swing at his cousin, and the guide boat, as if suddenly tired of her passengers, calmly upset and spilled them out.

A moment later the true gallantry of Mr. Bob Jonstone showed forth in glorious colors. Having risen to the surface and made good his hold upon the overturned boat, he proposed very humbly, as amends for causing the accident, to let go and drown.

"If you do," said Maud, excitement overcoming her sense of the ridiculous, "I'll never speak to you again."

Colonel Meredith opened his mouth to laugh and closed it a little hastily on about a pint of water.

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