f you don't want a drenching!" warned Hilary. "Besides," she
added, with inconsequent optimism, "anything may happen before then. Why,
I may even be married to a man I really like."

"Great Scotland, so you may!" chuckled her brother. "There's the wild man
that Dick has brought down here to tame before launching at society. He's
a great beast like a brown bear. He wouldn't be my taste, but that's a
detail."

"I hate fashionable men!" declared Hilary, with scarlet face. "I'd rather
marry a red Indian than one of these inane men about town."

"Ho! ho!" laughed Bertie. "Then Dick's wild man will be quite to your
taste. As soon as he leaves off worrying mutton-bones with his fingers
and teeth, we'll ask Dick to bring him to dine."

"You're perfectly disgusting!" said Hilary, digging her punt-pole into
the bed of the river with a vicious plunge. "If you don't mean to behave
yourself, I won't stay with you."

"Oh, yes, you will," returned Bertie with brotherly assurance. "You
wouldn't miss Dick's aborigine for anything--and I don't blame you, for
he's worth seeing. Dick assures me that he is quite harmless, or I don't
know that I should care to venture my scalp at such close quarters."

"You're positively ridiculous to-day," Hilary declared.

* * * * *

A perfect summer morning, a rippling blue river that shone like glass
where the willows dipped and trailed, and a girl who sang a murmurous
little song to herself as she slid down the bank into the laughing
stream.

Ah, it was heavenly! The sun-flecks on the water danced and swam all
about her. The trees whispered to one another above her floating form.
The roses on the garden balustrade of Dick Culver's bungalow nodded as
though welcoming a friend. She turned over and struck out vigorously,
swimming up-stream. It was June, and the whole world was awake and
singing.

"It's better than the entire London season put together," she murmured to
herself, as she presently came drifting back.

A whiff of tobacco-smoke interrupted her soliloquy. She shook back her
wet hair and stood up waist-deep in the clear, green water.

"What ho, Dick!" she called gaily. "I can't see you, but I know you're
there. Come down and have a swim, you lazy boy!"

There followed a pause. Then a diffident voice with an unmistakably
foreign accent made reply.

"Were you speaking to me?"

Glancing up in the direction of the voice, Hilary discovered a stranger
s