r aunt,"
replied Philip pleasantly, "I'll pack up my two shirts and my wildwood
pipe and depart, exceedingly grateful for my stay in Arcadia."

Diane bit her lip and frowned.

"Suppose," she flashed, with angry scarlet in her cheeks, "suppose I
break camp and leave you behind!"

"I'll go with you," shrugged Philip. "Don't you remember? I told you
so before. And I'll sit on the rear steps of the van all the way to
Florida and play a tin whistle."

Appalled by the thought of the spectacular vagaries which this Young
Man of the Sea might develop if she took to the road, Diane said
nothing.

"No matter how I view you," she indignantly exclaimed a little later,
"you're a problem."

"Settle the problem," advised Philip. "It's simple enough."

"He'll go presently," she told herself resentfully. "He'll have to."

"How it amuses these fish to watch me murder worms!" exclaimed Philip
in deep disgust. "Look at the audience over there! I attract 'em and
you get 'em! Miss Westfall, are you a slave driver?"

"What do you mean?" asked Diane cautiously.

Philip's most innocent beginnings frequently led into argumentative
morasses for his opponent.

"Does Johnny have complete freedom in your camp?"

"Certainly!" exclaimed Diane warmly. "Johnny is old and faithful. He
may do as he pleases."

Philip changed an angemic worm of considerable transparency for one of
more interest to his river audience and smiled.

"Johnny," said he cheerfully, "has been good enough to invite me to
stay in camp with him indefinitely. I'm his guest, in fact, until you
go home. I imagine that as Johnny's guest I ought to enjoy immunity
from sarcastic shafts, but I may be mistaken. I've washed and drained
most of these worms. Will you lend me an inch or so of that stout
invertebrate climbing out of the can by you?"

Thoroughly out of patience, Diane reeled in her line and returned to
camp, whence she presently heard Philip blithely whistling a
fisherman's hornpipe and urging Nero to retrieve certain sticks he had
thrown into the river. A little later he caught a sunfish and swung
into camp with such a smile of irresistible pride and good humor on his
sun-browned face, that Diane laughed in spite of herself.

"How ridiculous it is!" she mused uncomfortably. "Here I may not
depart for fear a happy-go-lucky young man will play a tin whistle on
the steps of the van, and I will not go home. What in the world am I
to do with him?