it was the scout's turn to hang, breathless, upon the
interrogation as he too jumped to his feet.

"Because--oh! because I'd be--be ever so much more comfortable without
him--enjoy myself more." Pem caught her breath wildly.

"Then 'twill be A. W. O. L. for him! ... A. W. O. L. for him--if I
perish for it!"

"What--what does that mean?"

"Absent With-Out Leave, as they set it down in the Army!"

Mischief leaped to the Henkyl Hunter's eye.

He beckoned Peagreen from the grass to follow him. A whisper in the
tender-foot's ear and down the winding sod-steps of the cliff they
scrambled!

Pem knew that she ought to call them back; knew it from the white
parting at the side of her throbbing little head to the toe of her satin
slipper tumultuously beating the ground, as she sank down, an orchid
amid her chiffons, to watch.

But it was a moment when the spice of her chowchow name had all spilled
over; when the Vain Elf which, according to her father, slept in the
shadow of the Wise Woman, was broadly--mutinously--awake.

The boat had drawn in alongside the decked float now.

It was gently rocking there, on and off, the rower having shipped his
oars and laid them beside him, his strong fingers now and again hooking
the wharf when there was danger of his drifting away, while his obsessed
nose was bent closer still to the newspaper sheet, catching the last
rays of daylight on it.

He did not look up when the scouts, running out over the plank bridge,
spoke to him.

Suddenly one of them--Stud it was--leaned down and snatched the oars,
lifted them high in the air, the nickum's evil genius having prompted
him to lay them in the boat's side nearest the wharf; perhaps it was the
demon which he had dared by sitting in the Devil's Chair.

At the same time Peagreen gave the boat a strong shove outward to where
a current caught it and swept it further--mockingly further, towards the
darkening center of the Bowl.

"Oh! I say--I say, you fellows, that's no stunt to pull off!" roared the
nickum wrathfully. "I'm due at the dance now!"

"You're not coming to the dance. There's a girl here who doesn't want
you!" rang back the voice of callow chivalry in the barbarous pipe of
the tenderfoot.

And Pem, slipping up from the grass, her hands to her burning
cheeks--for she had not meant it to go as far as this--stole back to the
piazza, to dance away from the shamefaced ecstasy of reprisal in her
heart.

Perhaps she would have