rstanding." He spread out his hands. "You have
an example; I'm spouting at large again."

"Go on," she begged; "I'm interested. But have you ever thought that
instead of being younger than we are you're really older. I mean that you
have gone back a long way; begun again at an earlier stage, instead of
going ahead?"

"Now you get at the bottom of things!" he exclaimed. "That's always been
an idea of mine. The people of the newer countries, perhaps more
particularly those to whom I belong, are brought back to the grapple with
elemental conditions. We're on the bed-rock of nature."

"Are you too modest to go any further?"

He showed faint signs of confusion and she laughed. "No doubt, the
situation makes for pristine vigor, and we are drifting into
artificiality," she suggested. "Perhaps you, the toilers, the subduers of
the wilderness, are to serve as an anchor for the supercivilized
generations to hold on by." She paused and quoted softly: "'Pioneers; O
pioneers!'"

"What can I say to that?" he asked with half-amused embarrassment. "We're
pretty egotistical, but one can't go back on Whitman."

"No," she laughed mischievously; "I think you're loyal; and there are
situations from which it's difficult to extricate oneself. Didn't you
find it so, for example, when you declined to come here with Nasmyth,
because Miss Crestwick had pressed you to go to Marple's?"

He could think of no neat reply to this and the obvious fact pleased her,
for she guessed that he would rather have spent the evening with her.
This was true, for now, sitting in the quiet garden in her company, he
looked back on the entertainment with something like disgust. Marple's
male friends were, for the most part, characterized by a certain
grossness and sensuality; in their amusements at games of chance one or
two had displayed an open avarice. These things jarred on the man who had
toiled among the rocks and woods, where he had practised a stringent
self-denial.

"I heard that you figured in a striking little scene," Millicent went on.

"I couldn't help it." Lisle appeared annoyed. "That man Batley irritated
me; though, after all, I don't blame him the most."

This was a slip.

"Whom do you blame?" she asked sharply.

"Oh," he explained, "I wasn't the only person, present, and I hadn't
arrived at the beginning. Somebody should have stopped the fellow; the
shares he tried to work off on Crestwick were no good."

"Then Batley wanted to sell t