e of
manhood, was thirty-five. Yet such was the fact.

July was ushered in by a couple of days of blustering and fretful rain,
and Darcy, unwilling to risk a chill, kept to the house. But to Frank
this weeping change of weather seemed to have no bearing on the behavior
of man, and he spent his days exactly as he did under the suns of June,
lying in his hammock, stretched on the dripping grass, or making huge
rambling excursions into the forest, the birds hopping from tree to tree
after him, to return in the evening, drenched and soaked, but with the
same unquenchable flame of joy burning within him.

"Catch cold?" he would ask, "I've forgotten how to do it, I think.
I suppose it makes one's body more sensible always to sleep out-of-doors.
People who live indoors always remind me of something peeled and
skinless."

"Do you mean to say you slept out-of-doors last night in that deluge?"
asked Darcy. "And where, may I ask?"

Frank thought a moment.

"I slept in the hammock till nearly dawn," he said. "For I remember the
light blinked in the east when I awoke. Then I went--where did I go?--oh,
yes, to the meadow where the Pan-pipes sounded so close a week ago. You
were with me, do you remember? But I always have a rug if it is wet."

And he went whistling upstairs.

Somehow that little touch, his obvious effort to recall where he had
slept, brought strangely home to Darcy the wonderful romance of which he
was the still half-incredulous beholder. Sleep till close on dawn in a
hammock, then the tramp--or probably scamper--underneath the windy and
weeping heavens to the remote and lonely meadow by the weir! The picture
of other such nights rose before him; Frank sleeping perhaps by the
bathing-place under the filtered twilight of the stars, or the white
blaze of moon-shine, a stir and awakening at some dead hour, perhaps a
space of silent wide-eyed thought, and then a wandering through the
hushed woods to some other dormitory, alone with his happiness, alone
with the joy and the life that suffused and enveloped him, without other
thought or desire or aim except the hourly and never-ceasing communion
with the joy of nature.

They were in the middle of dinner that night, talking on indifferent
subjects, when Darcy suddenly broke off in the middle of a sentence.

"I've got it," he said. "At last I've got it."

"Congratulate you," said Frank. "But what?"

"The radical unsoundness of your idea. It is this: All nature fr