, brilliant-tinted bulltrout. And, rod in hand, she bent
breathless and intent over the bushes, cautiously thrusting the tip
through a thicket of mint.

She lost two fish, then hooked a third--a small one; but when she lifted
it gasping into the sunlight, she shivered and called to Selwyn:

"Unhook it and throw it back! I--I simply can't stand that!"

Splash! went the astonished trout; and she sighed her relief.

"There's no doubt about it," she said, "you and I certainly do belong
to different species of the same genus; men and women _are_ separate
species. Do you deny it?"

"I should hate to lose you that way," he returned teasingly.

"Well, you can't avoid it. I gladly admit that woman is not too closely
related to man. We don't like to kill things; it's an ingrained
distaste, not merely a matter of ethical philosophy. You like to kill;
and it's a trait common also to children and other predatory animals.
Which fact," she added airily, "convinces me of woman's higher
civilisation."

"It would convince me, too," he said, "if woman didn't eat the things
that man kills for her."

"I know; isn't it horrid! Oh, dear, we're neither of us very high in the
scale yet--particularly you."

"Well, I've advanced some since the good old days when a man went wooing
with a club," he suggested.

"_You_ may have. But, anyway, you don't go wooing. As for man
collectively, he has not progressed so very far," she added demurely.
"As an example, that dreadful Draymore man actually hurt my wrist."

Selwyn looked up quickly, a shade of frank annoyance on his face and a
vision of the fat sybarite before his eyes. He turned again to his
fishing, but his shrug was more of a shudder than appeared to be
complimentary to Percy Draymore.

She had divined, somehow, that it annoyed Selwyn to know that men had
importuned her. She had told him of her experience as innocently as she
had told Nina, and with even less embarrassment. But that had been long
ago; and now, without any specific reason, she was not certain that she
had acted wisely, although it always amused her to see Selwyn's
undisguised impatience whenever mention was made of such incidents.

So, to torment him, she said: "Of course it is somewhat exciting to be
asked to marry people--rather agreeable than otherwise--"

"What!"

Waist deep in bay-bushes he turned toward her where she sat on the trunk
of an oak which had fallen across the stream. Her arms balanced her
body