some luxury
of fruit or camping device, in a hundred delicate ways he contrived to
make the girl his debtor, talking much in his grave and courtly way of
the gratitude he owed her. Adroitly then this romantic minstrel spun
his shining, varicolored web, linking them together as sympathetic
nomads of the summer road; adroitly too he banned Philip, who by reason
of a growing and mysterious habit of sleeping by day had gained for
himself a blighting reputation of callous indifference to the charm of
the beautiful rolling country all around them.

"I'm exceedingly sorry," read a scroll of birch bark which Ras drowsily
delivered to Diane one sunset, "but I'll have to ask you to invite me
to supper. Ras bought an unhappy can of something or other behind in
the village and it exploded.

"Philip."

"If I refuse," Diane wrote on the back, "you'll come anyway. You
always do. Why write? Will you contribute enough hay for a cushion?
Johnny's making a new one for Rex."

It was one of the vexing problems of Diane's nomadic life, just how to
treat Mr. Philip Poynter. It was increasingly difficult to ignore or
quarrel with him--for his memory was too alarmingly porous to cherish a
grudge or resentment. When a man has had a bump upon his only head,
held Mr. Poynter, things are apt to slip away from him. Wherefore one
may pardon him if after repeated commands to go home, and certain
frost-bitten truths about officious young men, he somehow forgot and
reappeared in the camp of the enemy in radiant good humor.

Philip presently arrived with a generous layer of hay under his arm and
a flour bag of tomatoes.

"Hello," he called warmly. "Isn't the sunset bully! It even woke old
Ras up and he's blinking and grumbling like fury." Mr. Poynter fell to
chatting pleasantly, meanwhile removing from his clothing certain wisps
of hay.

"You're always getting into hay or getting out of it!" accused Diane.

Philip admitted with regret that this might be so and Diane stared
hopelessly at his immaculate linen. Heaven alone knew by what
ingenuity Mr. Poynter, handicapped by the peculiar limitations of a
hay-camp, contrived to manage his wardrobe. What mysterious toilet
paraphernalia lay beneath the hay, what occasional laundry chores Ras
did by brook and river, what purchases Mr. Poynter made in every
village, and finally what an endless trail of shirts and cuffs and
collars lay behind him, doomed, like the cheese and buns, as