turned Belle's cordial greeting rather stiffly. Then Miss
Dolly calmly walked over to the pair sitting apart, having evidently
recognized the back of Lincoln's blazer. She pretended to stumble over
one of his feet.

"Oh, excuse me!" said she; and when Link sprang up, Mary Mason had the
pleasure of witnessing the warmest sort of a meeting between the engaged
lovers. They sallied off in the moonlight, his arm around her waist.

No one but me noticed the young girl slipping down on the sand, and
laying her head on the log on which she had been sitting, and even I
pretended not to see that her handkerchief was in action.

"Hello, Mary!" said I, "I'll match you skipping stones. Look at this!"

With that I sent a beautiful flat one skimming along with nearly a dozen
hops in the brilliant track of the moon on the water. She did not pay
any attention to me at first, and I kept skipping away, just as if I
did not see her mopping her eyes. By-and-by a stroke worthy of myself
sent a pebble spinning through the ripples, and Mary's ready laugh rang
out beside me. Within twenty minutes of Dolly Martin's appearance on the
scene, "Mamie" was the center of the corn-roasters, and the gayest of
the gay. Belle told me she kept on that line of conduct during the whole
week that Miss Martin and her mother stayed at the hotel.

"It seemed to me that Dolly took a special pleasure in parading her
happiness before poor Mary, but Mary never showed the white feather."

"There's the making of a fine woman in her."

"That may be," said my wife. "But this last week she has been extremely
wearing on me. Having no particular man on the string, she has followed
me about like a spaniel, wanted to know what I'm reading, and has begun
a book the minute I'm through with it."

"I've seen her carrying 'The Coming Race' about with her lately, but I
notice that the bookmark always stays in the same place."

Mary became fond of solitary rambles back in the pine woods, intersected
by plank walks that made promenading possible. People liked to wander
through there in the evenings, when the camp-lights in the hollows lent
a mysterious charm, and on up to the big Knight Templar's Building,
erected on the highest point of the sandy bluff overlooking Lake
Michigan. Every night that prominent structure blazed with electric
lights, and sometimes a band played on the veranda; but the only
visitors were cottagers and guests from the hotel, who went up there to
wa