rs in the
power-house of the University. He spoke again, as though in answer
to what might naturally be in her mind: "At the top of the road it
crosses a brook, and I think a wash would be possible. I've a bit
of soap in my pocket that'll help--though it takes quite a lot of
scrubbing to get off fire-fighting grime." He looked pointedly down at
her as he talked.

Sylvia was so astonished that she dropped back through years of
carefully acquired self-consciousness into a moment of the stark
simplicity of childhood. "Why--is _my_ face dirty?" she cried out.

The man beside her apparently found the contrast between her looks and
the heartfelt sincerity of her question too much for him. He burst
into helpless laughter, though he was adroit enough to thrust forward
as a pretext, "The picture of my _own_ grime that I get from your
accent is tremendous!" But it was evidently not at his own joke that
he was laughing.

For an instant Sylvia hung poised very near to extreme annoyance.
Never since she had been grown up, had she appeared at such an absurd
disadvantage. But at once the mental picture of herself, making
inaudible carping strictures on her companion's sootiness and, all
unconscious, lifting to observe it a critical countenance as swart as
his own--the incongruity smote her deliciously, irresistibly! Sore
heart or not, black depression notwithstanding, she needs must laugh,
and having laughed, laugh again, laugh louder and longer, and finally,
like a child, laugh for the sake of laughing, till out through this
unexpected channel she discharged much of the stagnant bitterness
around her heart.

Her companion laughed with her. The still, sultry summer woods echoed
with the sound. "How human, how lusciously _human_!" he exclaimed.
"Neither of us thought that _he_ might be the blackened one!"

"Oh, mine _can't_ be as bad as yours!" gasped out Sylvia, but when
she rubbed a testing handkerchief on her cheek, she went off in fresh
peals at the sight of the resultant black smears.

"Don't, for Heaven's sake, waste that handkerchief," cautioned her
companion. "It's the only towel between us. Mine's impossible!" He
showed her the murky rag which was his own; and as they spoke, they
reached the top of the road, heard the sound of water, and stood
beside the brook.

He stepped across it, in one stride of his long legs, rolled up his
shirt-sleeves, took a book out of his pocket, laid it on a stone, and
knelt down. "I choo