It was not a wide and lordly river, but as the silent man and the crooning girl drifted down its narrow and winding course between screening festoons of wild grapevine and Virginia creeper and bittersweet and sentinellike elms and buttonwoods and willows, it seemed the most beautiful stream that ever wound between earthly hills, as tranquilizing and placid as Lethe itself. Macraven, at the oars, had already forgotten his disquieting fears. Sybil, in the stern, trailed her fingers in the limpid amber water. The sun was high and hot; the shadows were dark and cool. Time and the world were no longer remembered.
They had decided to drift down to Anona Island, where the river widened into a broken and shallow lagoon. It was there, Sybil explained, that she usually found her first water lilies. And they could build a little fire on the island, and make tea, and have luncheon, and start out to look for the lilies later in the afternoon, when it was cooler.
They had surrendered to a mood of lazy merriment, and during that Arcadian repast were as light-hearted as children, in the face of the fact that their milk jug had fallen into the river and their lemon pie had been sat on by the unsuspecting professor. Sybil deftly spread her cloth on the sloping stretch of green turf, while Macraven blew on the fire until he was red in the face, and then fanned the embers with his hat until the smudge drove his companion, sneezing, to the upper ground, where she rubbed her eyes and looked down on him with demure dissatisfaction.
“You know exactly as much about building a fire as I know about cooking a meal!” she declared, with a sigh of resignation.
“Why, do you mean to say you've never learned cooking, and all that sort of thing?” he demanded, turning on her suddenly. Then these biscuits, as white and light as snowflakes, on which he had been feasting his eyes, were the flowering of the humble Hannah's art!
“Pooh!” she said, with a little gesture of disgust. “I hate it!”
“But I say, supposing you should have to do that sort of thing some day?” rejoined the practical scientist, wondering why her confession should so depress and disturb him.
“But I never shall!” said Sybil airily, coming back to where the luncheon was spread. She could see by his face that he still nursed old-fashioned prejudices as to the domestic woman and her ways. “But I hate it, just the same!” she added honestly, even as she remembered that Anne was able to make Southern corn puddings about which her father would talk for months afterward.
Macraven gazed out over the water with empty and meditative eyes.
“You think I'm lazy and—and good for nothing” began the girl, throwing pebbles into the river.
“But look at Anne, with all her wealth, with all her opportunities for idling—see how well she can do those things!”
“I'm sick of hearing of Anne” cried the girl. “For ten years, I've had Anne held up to me as a paragon of all the virtues, and I'm tired of it! And when she comes here—and you remember what I'm saying!—I'm going to make her act just as silly and crazy as I do! Wait and see if I don't!” And she flung a pebble with a bang against a near-by pine stump.
When she broke the silence, at last, the change in her tone and the new wistfulness in her face strangely touched her companion's heart.
“You can't remember how poor mother used to shock all Amboro, can you? She was a Southern woman, you know—and Amboro was always so much the other way! I must have taken it from her! I guess I'll just have to go on cakewalking through life, for I hate hard work and sewing and cooking and cleaning up and having to think and plan ahead!”
“A girl who can—can write poetry like yours doesn't need to know all that sort of thing,” the repentant man mollified the egotistic young pagan at his side, just because she was such a sad and beautiful young pagan.
But her lightness of spirit did not come back to her until they had made away with their luncheon and were strolling along the fringes of the little island, looking for pond lilies. As they sauntered on and rested and idled the time away, she cunningly wove a garland of oak leaves. Then, as he sat gazing into a little bay of translucent amber water, she took his black wide-awake from his head, with her girlishly conciliating laugh, and in its place put there the crown of leaves.
“I'm a wood nymph, you see,” she said, as she knelt beside him, “and you are the wood god, Pan, and I'm crowning you with leaves that came from some old Ionian forest.”
“Oh, I say!” he protested.
“No, don't touch it! Don't dare!” she cried imperiously.
“But I prefer”