r-arms, ankles
crossed, and her head a trifle lowered, as though absorbed in studying
the Herati design on a Persian rug.

Once, looking up suddenly, he surprised her brown eyes full of tears.

"Hello!" he said, amazed; "what's the row, Sis?"

But she only laughed and dried her eyes, denying that there was any
explanation except that girls were sometimes that way for no reason at
all.

One day he asked Kathleen privately about this, but she merely confirmed
Geraldine's diagnosis of the phenomenon:

"Tears come into girls' eyes," she said, "and there isn't anybody on
earth who can tell a man why, and he wouldn't comprehend it if anybody
did tell him."

"I'll tell you one thing," he said sceptically; "if Rose-beetles shed
tears, I'd never rest until I found out why. You bet there's always a
reason that starts anything and always somebody to find it out and tell
another fellow who can understand it!"

With which brilliant burst of higher philosophy they went out into the
October woods together to hunt for cocoons.

Geraldine, rather flushed and nervous, met them at Hurryon Gate,
carrying a rifle and wearing the shortest skirts her brother had ever
beheld. The symmetry of her legs moved him to reproof:

"I thought people looked that way only in tailor's fashion plates," he
said. "What are you after--chipmunks?"

"Not at all," said his sister. "Do you know what happened to me an hour
ago? I was paddling your canoe into the Hurryon Inlet, and I suppose I
made no noise in disembarking, and I came right on a baby wild boar in
the junipers. It was a tiny thing, not eighteen inches long, Kathleen,
and so cunning and furry and yellowish, with brown stripes on its back,
that I tried to catch it--just to hug it."

"That was silly," said her brother.

"I know it was, now. Because I ran after it, and it ran; and, one by
one, a whole herd of the cunning little things sprang out of the hemlock
scrub and went off bucking and bucketing in all directions, and I, like
a simpleton, hard after one of them----"

"Little idiot," said her brother solicitously. "Are you stark mad?"

"No, I'm just plain mad. Because, before I knew it, there came a crash
in the underbrush and the biggest, furriest, and wickedest wild boar I
ever saw halted in front of me, ears forward, every hair on end----"

"Lord save us, you jumped the sow!" groaned her brother. "She might have
torn you to pieces, you ninny!"

"She meant to, I think. The next