g off with fudge and cheese sticks. Then they spread themselves
on the table rocks and regarded the scenery pensively. Having climbed
up at great expense of strength and effort, it was now necessary to
retrace their footsteps. The thought was disconcerting.

Edith, who never moved without a book, pulled a small edition of Keats
from her pocket and began to read aloud:

"My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk--"

A short laugh interrupted this scene of intellectual repose. Edith
paused and looked up, annoyed.

"I see nothing to laugh at," she said. But the faces of her classmates
were quite serious.

"No one laughed," said Molly.

"A rudely person did laugh," announced Otoyo decisively. "But not of us.
Another hidden behind the rock."

The girls looked around them uneasily. There was no one in sight,
apparently, and yet there had been a laugh from somewhere close by.
Coming to think of it, they had all heard it.

"I think we'd better be going," said Margaret, rising hastily. "We can
see the view on the other side some other day."

Twice that day Margaret, the coming suffragette, had proved herself
lacking in a certain courage generally attributed to the new and
independent woman.

"Come on," she continued, irritably. "Don't stop to gather up those
sandwiches. We must hurry."

Perhaps they were all of them a little frightened, but nobody was quite
so openly and shamelessly scared as President Wakefield. They had seized
their sweaters and were about to follow her down the steep path, when
another laugh was heard, and suddenly a strange man rushed from behind
one of the large boulders and seized Margaret by the arm.

The President gave one long, despairing shriek that waked the echoes,
while the other girls, too frightened to move, crouched together in a
trembling group.

Then the little Japanese bounded from their midst with the most
surprising agility, seized the man by his thumb and with a lightning
movement of the arm struck him under the chin.

With a cry of intense pain, the tramp, for such he appeared to be, fell
back against the rock, his black slouch hat fell off, and a quantity of
dark hair tumbled down on his shoulders. Judith Blount, looking
exceedingly ludicrous in a heavy black mustache, stood before them.

"Oh, how you hurt me," she cried, turning angrily on Otoyo.

Otoyo shrank back in amazement.

"Pardon," she said timidly. "I did