ng his hope that it was
not. But the assent was general. They were all as excited over the
prospect of a picnic as if they were slum children about to enjoy their
first charitable outing, and it was settled that they were to start at
ten o'clock. Mrs. Minor and Miss Gold went into the kitchen to help
Mrs. Larsing make sandwiches and salads, and the others ran down to the
lake.

L

Clavering had tied the boat to a tree in a little inlet far down the
lake, and they were walking through a wood of spruce trees and balsam.
There was no leafy curtain here, although they could see one swaying on
either side through open vistas between the rigid columns of the spruce.
A trail was hardly necessary for there was no undergrowth, and although
the trees were set close together they were easily circumnavigated.

It was some time since they had spoken. His face was graver than she had
ever seen it, and she waited for him to speak. She almost could feel
those unuttered words beating on the silence of the woods. There was
nothing else to break that silence but the faint constant murmur in the
tree-tops, and once, beyond that leafy curtain, the sudden trilling of a
solitary bird. Again, the tremendousness of this high isolation swept
over her. The camp and its gay party might have been on some far distant
lake.

He put his arm around her firmly. "I am not going to pretend any
further," he said. "It is too big for that. And you have never been
anything but Mary Ogden to me, except, perhaps, on that night I have
practically dismissed from my mind. I called you Mary Ogden to myself
until I learned your new name, and I don't think that name has ever come
into my thoughts of you. And although you slipped on another skin with
it you were always Mary Ogden underneath. You needed a new name for your
new role, but, like any actress on the stage, it had nothing to do with
your indestructible personality. I say this because I want you to
understand that although I cannot play up to your little comedy any
longer and go through the forms of wooing you as if you were a girl--I
shouldn't like you half as well if you were--I do not think of you or
wish you to think of yourself as anything but Mary Ogden."

He paused a moment, and she slipped her arm about him and they walked on
through the wood.

"I cannot go on with it because these days up here that we can spend
almost altogether alone, if we will, are too sacred to waste o