ed off his white flannels and stood in his blue bathing-suit,
not statue-like, not very brown now, but trim-waisted, shapely armed,
wonderfully clean of neck and jaw. With a "Wheee!" he dashed into the
water and swam out, overhand.

As he turned over and glanced back, his heart caught to see her
standing on the creamy sand, a shy, elfin figure in a boy's
bathing-suit of black wool, woman and slim boy in one, silken-throated
and graceful-limbed, curiously smaller than when dressed. Her white
skirt and blouse lay tumbled about her ankles. She raised rosy arms to
hide her flushed face and her eyes, as she cried:

"Don't look!"

He obediently swam on, with a tenderness more poignant than longing.
He heard her splashing behind him, and turned again, to see her racing
through the water. Those soft yet not narrow shoulders rose and fell
sturdily under the wet black wool, her eyes shone, and she was all
comradely boy save for her dripping, splendid hair. Singing, "Come on,
lazy!" she headed across the pond. He swam beside her, reveling in the
well-being of cool water and warm air, till they reached the solemn
shade beneath the trees on the other side, and floated in the dark,
still water, splashing idle hands, gazing into forest hollows, spying
upon the brisk business of squirrels among the acorns.

Back at their greenwood room, Ruth wrapped her sailor blouse about
her, and they squatted like un-self-conscious children on the beach,
while from a field a distant locust fiddled his August fandango and in
flame-colored pride an oriole went by. Fresh sky, sunfish like tropic
shells in the translucent water, arching reeds dipping their
olive-green points in the water, wavelets rustling against a gray
neglected rowboat, and beside him Ruth.

Musingly they built a castle of sand. An hour of understanding so
complete that it made the heart melancholy. When he sighed, "Getting
late; come on, blessed; we're dry now," it seemed that they could
never again know such rapt tranquillity.

Yet they did. For that evening when they stood on the terrace, trying
to forget that he must leave her and go back to the lonely city in the
morning, when the mist reached chilly tentacles up from the valley,
they kissed a shy good-by, and Carl knew that life's real adventure is
not adventuring, but finding the playmate with whom to quest life's
meaning.

CHAPTER XL

After six festival months of married life--in April or May, 1914--the
hap