The fact of Arthur's sudden blossoming into a full-fledged and emphatic figure of romance had an unsettling effect upon many of the peacefully disposed minds in The Camp. It is always so when friends, especially in youth, come to partings of ways. Clement, who takes the Low road, cannot but be disturbed at the thought of those possible adventures which lie in wait for Covington, who has fared forth by the High. There was the feeling among many of the young people in the camp that, if they didn't hurry, they might be left behind. Nobody expressed this feeling or acknowledged it or recognized in it anything more than a feeling of unrest; but it existed, nevertheless, and had its effect upon actions and affections.

Renier had been leading a life of almost perfect happiness. For the things that made him happy were the same sort of things that make boys happy. No school; no parental obstructions or admonitions; green-and-blue days filled from end to end with fishing, sailing, making fires, shooting at marks, and perfecting himself in physical attainments. Add to these things the digestion and the faculties of a healthy boy interested neither in drink, tobacco, nor in any book which failed to contain exciting and chivalrous adventures, and, above all, a companion whose tastes and sympathies were such that she might just as well have been a boy as not.

They were chums rather than sweethearts. It needed a sense of old times coming to an end and new times beginning to make them realize the full depth and significance of their attachment for each other.

There were four of us once "in a kingdom by the sea," and I shall not forget the awful sense of partings and finality, and calamity, for that matter, furnished by a sudden sight of the first flaming maple of autumn.

"I think your mother's a perfect brick," said Renier. "She makes you feel as if she'd known you all your life, and was kind of grateful to you for living."

"I'm rather crazy about the prince," said Lee. "Of course, I oughtn't to be. But I can't help it, and after all he's been awfully good to mamma. Do you believe in divorce?"

"I never did until I saw your mother. She wouldn't ask for anything that she didn't really deserve."

"But it's funny, isn't it," said Lee, "that so many people get on famously together until they are actually married, and then they begin to fight like cats? I knew a girl who was engaged to a man for five years. You'd think they'd get to know each other pretty well in that time, wouldn't you? But they didn't. They hadn't been married six months before they hated each other."

"And that proves," said Renier, "that long engagements are a mistake."

"Smarty!" exclaimed Lee.

"I suppose your brother'll be getting married right away, won't he? Haven't they liked each other for ever so long?"

"M'm!" Lee nodded. "But Arthur never does anything right away. He does too much mooning and wool-gathering. If a united family can get him to the altar in less than a year they'll have accomplished wonders. There's one thing, though—when we do get him married good and proper, he'll stay married. He's like that at all games. It comes natural to him to keep his eyes in the boat. He's got the finest and sweetest nature of any man in this world, I think."

"Of course, you except present company?"

"Heavens, yes!" cried Lee, and they both laughed.

Then, suddenly, Lee looked him in the eyes quite solemnly.

"I wasn't fooling," she said, "not entirely. I do think you're fine and sweet. I didn't always, but I do now."

There was levity in Renier's words but not in his voice.

"This," he said, "so far has been a perfectly good Tuesday."

"Whatever we do together," said Lee, "you always give me the best of it. It's been a good summer."

"Do you feel as if summer was over, too?"

She nodded.

"That's funny, isn't it? Because it's nowhere near over, is it? Maybe it's the excitement of the Oducalchis' arrival and your brother's engagement. It makes you sort of feel as if there wasn't time to settle back into the regular life and get things going again before the leaves fall."

He spoke. And from the fine striped maple under which they sat there fell, and fluttered slowly into Lee's lap, a great yellowing leaf ribbed with incipient scarlet.

"That only means," said Renier—but there was a kind of awe in his voice—"that this particular tree has indigestion."

And they sat for a time in silence and looked at the leaf. And lo! Arthur came upon them, smiling.

"I was looking for you two," he said. "I thought maybe you'd do me a great favor. I've got to play host, and——"

"Nobody would miss us!" exclaimed Lee.

"They wouldn't?" said Arthur. "I'll bet you anything you like that, during your absence, you will both be mentioned among the missing, by name, at least five times."

"What'll you bet?" asked Lee eagerly. "Nobody ever thinks of us. Nobody ever mentions us. Nobody even loves us. What'll you bet?"

"Anything you like," said Arthur, "and if necessary I will take charge of the five personal mentionings and make them myself!"

Lee shook her head sadly, and said: "Once an accepted lover, always a sure thing, man. Oh, Arthur, how low you have fallen! You used to engineer bets with me for the sheer joy of seeing me win them. But now you are on the make, and it looks as if there was no justice under heaven— Where do you want us to go and what do you want us to do when we get there? Of course, we'll go; we always do. Everybody sends us on errands, and we always go. The longer the errands the oftener we go. But nobody seems to realize that we might enjoy spending one single solitary afternoon sitting under a striped maple and watching the green leaves turn yellow. Nobody even loves us! But when we are dead there will be the most frightful remorse and sorrow."

Arthur leaned heavily against the stem of the striped maple.

"Your sad case," he said, "certainly cries aloud for justice and redress——"

"'Kid us along, Bo,'" said Lee; "we love it!"

"I want two people," said Arthur, "for whom I have affection and in whom I have confidence, to go at once to Carrytown in the Streak and consult a lawyer upon a matter of paramount importance and delicacy—" He hesitated, and Lee said:

"I pray you, without further ado, continue your piquant narrative."

Then Arthur, in a tone of solemn, confidential eagerness:

"Look here, you two, go to Carrytown, will you, and find out how quickly two people can get married in the State of New York, and what they have to do about licenses and things? Will you? I'll be eternally obliged."

"Of course, we will," exclaimed Lee in sudden excitement. "Are you game?"

"You bet your sweet life I'm game!" cried the vulgar Renier. And a few minutes later the two inseparable school-boyesque chums, whom nobody mentioned, whom everybody sent on errands, and whom nobody even loved, were streaking across the lake in the Streak.

There was but the one lawyer in Carrytown and the one stenographer. Their shingles hang one above the other on the face of the one brick building.

At the door of this building Lee suddenly drew back.

"Look here!" she said. "Won't it look rather funny if we march in hand in hand and say: 'Beg pardon, sir, but how do you get married in the State of New York?'"

"It would look funny," said Renier, "and I shouldn't wonder if it made us feel funny. But the joke would really be on the lawyer. We could say 'Honi soit qui mal y pense' to him. Of course, if it would really embarrass you——"

"It wouldn't," said Lee, "really."

So they went up a narrow flight of stairs and knocked on the door of room Number Five. There was no answer. So they pushed open the door and entered a square room bound in sheepskin with red-and-black labels. There was nobody in the room, and Lee exclaimed:

"Nobody even loves us."

"He'll be in the back room," said Renier. "I know. Once I swiped a muskmelon from a lawyer's melon-patch, and had to see him about it. He was in the back room——"

"'Counting out his money'?"

"No; he was drinking whiskey with a judge and a livery-stable keeper, and they were all spitting on a red-hot stove."

"What did he do about the melon?"

"He told me to can the melon and have a drink. I had already canned the melon as well as I could (I wasn't educated along scientific lines) and my grandmother had promised me any watch I wanted if I didn't drink till I was twenty-one."

"Did you?"

"I did not."

"Did you get the watch?"

"I did not."

"Why not?"

"Grandma reneged. She said she didn't remember making any such promise."

They pushed open a swinging door and entered the back room.

Here, in a revolving chair, sat a stout young man with a red face. Upon his knees sat a stout young woman with a red face. And with something of the consistency with which a stamp adheres to an envelope so the one red face appeared glued to the other red face.

The red face of the stout young man had one free eye which detected the presence of intruders. And the stout young man said:

"Caught with the goods! Jump up, Minnie, and behave yourself!"

Minnie's upspring was almost a record-breaker.

Renier began to stammer:

"I b-b-beg your pardon," he said, "but I thought you might b-b-be able to tell me how to g-g-get married in New York State."

The stout young man rose from his revolving chair; he was embarrassed almost to the point of paralysis, but his mind and mouth continued to work.

"You've come to just the right man," he said, "at just the right time, for information of that sort. First, you hire a stenographer; then you get a mash on her. Then she sits in your lap—she will do it—and then you kiss her. And then you get a license, and then you curse laws and red tape for a while, and then you wed. Now, what you want is a license?"

"Exactly," said Renier. "It—it's for another fellow."

"Friend of yours?" queried the stout young man.

"Yes."

"And you want a license for him, not for yourself?"

Renier nodded.

"At this moment," said the stout young man, "there are assembled on the long wharf, chewin' tobacco and cursin', some twenty-five or thirty marines. Would you mind just stepping down and telling that to them?"

"I am quite serious," said Renier. "It is my friend who wants to get married."

"And you don't?"

Renier stammered ineffectually.

"Then," said the stout young man, with a glance at Lee (of the highest admiration), "you're a gol-darn fool."

And forthwith he was so vulgar as to burst into a sudden snatch of song:

"Old man Rule was a gol-darn fool,
For he couldn't see the water in the gol-darn pool!"

At the finish of this improvisation the dreadfully confused Minnie went, "Tee-hee!"

And, horror of horrors, that charming boylike companion, Lee Darling, behind whom were well-bred generations, also went suddenly, "Tee-hee."

"Licenses," said the stout young man, "are applied for in room Five. After you, sir; after you, miss."

And, with a waggish expression, he turned to Minnie.

"Be back in five minutes," he said; "try not to forget me, my flighty one."

When they were in the front room, he said:

"Before a license is issued, the licensor must be satisfied as to the preliminaries. Now, then, what can you tell me as to lap sitting and kissings?"

"You," cried Lee, in a sudden blaze of indignation, "are the freshest, most objectionable American I ever set eyes on."

The stout young man turned appealingly to Renier.

"You wouldn't say that," he said; "you'd say I was just typical, wouldn't you, now? And I wish you would tell her that, though in these backwoods I have been obliged to eschew my Chesterfield, I've got a great big heart in me and mean well."

During the last words of this speech he became appealingly wistful.

"Why," said he to Lee, "just because Minnie and me is stout, don't you think we know heaven when we see it—the empyrean! Yesterday she threw me down, and I says to her: 'Since all my life seems meant for "fails"—since this was written and needs must be—my whole soul rises up to bless your name in pride and thankfulness. Who knows but the world may end to-night?' To-day she sits in my lap and we see which can hug the hardest. Ever try that?"

And suddenly the creature's voice melted and shook. He was a genuine orator, as we Americans understand it, having that within his powers of voice that defies logic and melts the heart.

"Wouldn't you," he said, "even like to sit in his lap? Wouldn't you love to sit in his lap and be hugged?"

Lee looked to Renier for help, as he to her. And they took a step apiece directly toward each other, and another step. It was as if they had been hypnotized. Suddenly Renier caught Lee's hand in his, and after a moment of looking into his eyes she turned to the stout man, and sang in miraculous imitation of him:

"Young Miss Mule is a gol-darn fool,
But you made her see the water in the gol-darn pool."

"I'll just get a license blank," said the stout young man. "They're in the back room."

"Thank you," said Renier—"if you will, Mr.——"

"Heartbeat!" flashed the stout young man, and left them. And he wasn't lying or making fun that time. For that was his really truly name. And in northern New York people are beginning to think that he is by way of being up to it.

Suddenly Lee quoted from a joke that she and Renier had in common. She said, as if surprised:

"'Why, there's a table over there!'"

And Renier, his voice suddenly breaking and melting, answered:

"'Why, so there is—and here's a chair!'"

And Mr. Heartbeat, making a supreme effort to live up to his name, did not return with the license blank for nearly eight minutes. During those minutes, Renier resolved that in every room in his home there should be at least one revolving chair. And they came out of Mr. Heartbeat's office no longer boyish companions but lovers, a little startled, engaged, and licensed to be married.