Tisdale paused, looking again from face to face, while the humor gleamed in his own. "I am making a long story of it," he said modestly. "You must be tired!"
"Tired!" exclaimed Elizabeth, "It's the very best story I ever heard. Please go on."
"Of course you escaped," supplemented Marcia Feversham, "but we want to know how. And what was your chum doing all the time? And wasn't there another woman?"
Frederic Morganstein rumbled a short laugh. "Maybe you made the Lilliwaup, but I'll bet ten to one you missed your steamer."
Tisdale's eyes rested involuntarily again on Mrs. Weatherbee. She did not say anything, but she met the look with her direct gaze; her short upper lip parted, and the color burned softly in her cheek. "I made the Lilliwaup," he went on, "about two miles from the mouth, between the upper and lower falls. The river breaks in cascades there, hundreds of them as far as one can see, divided by tremendous boulders."
"We know the place," said Elizabeth quickly. "Our first cruise on the _Aquila_ was to the Lilliwaup. We climbed to the upper falls and spent hours along the cascades. Those boulders, hundreds of them, rose through the spray, all covered with little trees and ferns. There never was anything like it, but we called it The Fairy Isles."
Tisdale nodded. "It was near the end of that reach I found myself. The channels gather below, you remember, and pour down a steep declivity under a natural causeway. But the charm and grandeur were lost on me that day. I wanted to reach the old trail from the falls on the opposite shore, and I knew that stone bridge fell short a span, so I began to work my way from boulder to boulder out to the main stream. It was a wide chasm to leap, with an upward spring to a tilted table of basalt, and I overbalanced, slipped down, and, coasting across the surface, recovered enough on the edge to ease myself off to a nearly submerged ledge. There I stopped." He paused an instant, and his eyes sought Marcia Feversham's; the amusement played lightly on his flexible lips. "I had stumbled on another woman. She was seated on a lower boulder, sketching the stone bridge. I was behind her, but I saw a pretty hand and forearm, some nice brown hair tucked under a big straw hat, and a trim and young figure in a well-made gown of blue linen. Then she said pleasantly, without turning her head: 'Well, John, what luck?'