“Ah, you fastidious young woman! what shall I ever do with you, if you are cast away on a desert island with me?” exclaimed Clem, in mock despair.
“Set up a telegraph wire, and then she would need nothing more,” insinuated Cyn.
“And get snubbed for my pains!” muttered Clem, sotto voce. But Nattie caught the words, and an expression of distress passed over her face.
“This reminds me of that feast!” Cyn declared, as they sealed themselves wherever convenient, with a dish of whatever was handy.
“Only more so,” added Clem.
“What feast?” asked Celeste, curiously.
“One we had once,” Cyn replied evasively, glad there was something Celeste did not know about. In fact, in the matter of curiosity, Celeste was an embryo Miss Kling.
“I am sorry we have no Charlotte Russes today, Quimby,” remarked Clem, with an expression of transparent innocence.
Quimby could only reply with a groan. The recollections awakened were too much.
“What is the matter now, Ralfy?” asked the loving Celeste.
Again Quimby muttered something about “that tooth.”
“Oh!” said Celeste, tenderly, “you really must have it out, Ralfy!”
The possibility of being obliged to part with a sound tooth in self-defense, restored him for the time being. But he was not the only one to whom the retrospect brought a momentary pain. Nattie sighed as she looked back to the day that had brought Clem, but not restored as she then supposed, but taken away, her C.
“The salubrious air and the invigorating odor of the forest adds immeasurably to the natural capacity of the appetite!” commented Jo, gravely, as he passed his plate for the seventh fish.
“Ah!” sighed Celeste, who prided herself on her delicacy, “I never could eat more than would satisfy a mouse, and since my engagement,” simpering, “I cannot swallow enough to scarce keep me alive!”
Quimby looked up eagerly.
“I—I beg pardon, but if the—if the engagement weighs upon you, I—I am willing to release you, you know!” he exclaimed, hopefully.
“You jealous creature!” replied Celeste, archly. “You know, Ralfy, that no consideration could make me release you!”
Quimby knew it only too well, and sighed as he picked a chicken bone.
“A great objection to dining in the woods is that one is apt to find his food unexpectedly seasoned!” said Clem, as he captured a six-legged bug of an adventurous spirit, that had sought to investigate the contents of his plate.
“Isn’t it strange that bugs don’t seem half so bad in our food here as they would at home!” said Mrs. Simonson.
“Oh! we can get used to anything, if we only think so!” said Cyn, bringing her cheery philosophy to the front.
“Yes!” assented Quimby, mournfully, “I—I am used to it, you know!”
Cyn laughed, and then proposed the health of the betrothed pair, which was drank in lager beer, and to which Quimby, bolstered up by Celeste, attempted to respond, but collapsed in the middle of the third sentence, and with the words,
“Thank you! and I—I am used to it, you know!” sat down, wiped his forehead on his napkin, and looked intensely miserable.
After that they toasted Cyn, and then “Dots and Dashes,” and last, Jo with mock solemnity proposed “Fate.”
And just then Quimby met with a fresh mishap, and came near ending his sufferings in a watery grave, only the water did not happen to be quite deep enough. Arising from the sharp-pointed rock that had served him for a pivot on which to eat his dinner, he stumbled, fell and rolled over and over down the bank, and into the river, with a tremendous splash.
Everyone jumped up in consternation.
“Oh, Clem! Jo!” shrieked Celeste, wringing her hands, and rushing down to the water’s edge. “Save him! Save my darling Ralfy!”
“Ralfy,” however, was equal to saving his own life this time. The water was only up to his waist, and he had already picked himself up and was wading ashore.
“I—I am all right!” he said looking up at his anxious friends with a reassuring smile. “I—I am used to it, you know!”
As Clem assisted him up the bank, the thought came into Cyn’s head, why would it not be a good idea to push Nat—accidentally—into the river, so Clem might rescue her, and thus bring about that much to be desired crisis? But remembering that water would run the colors of her dress, and farther, how dreadfully unbecoming it was to be wet—a fact fully demonstrated by the present appearance of Quimby—Cyn rejected the idea as not exactly feasible.
They left Quimby drying on a sunny bank, with Celeste as guardian angel, love, and the remains of the repast to cheer her, and the consciousness that his clothes were shrinking on him as they dried, to divert him, and wandered off through the woods, and over the hills, gathering on the way so many flowers and green things, that Cyn declared they looked like Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane.
At first they were all together, then straggled apart; Mrs. Simonson being the first dereliction, as she was not quite equal to climbing as fast as the young people. Thus it came about that Nattie found herself alone with Clem, and suddenly stopping, with some embarrassment, but steadily, said,
“There is something I wish to say to you. You have spoken several times of late about my ‘snubbing’ you. I want to say, I have not intentionally done so; that I have the same—the same friendship for you as always, and that I wish you every happiness. What may have appeared to you as strange or cold in my conduct of late, is due to secrets of my own.”
Clem look at her scrutinizingly, as she spoke, and the flowers he had gathered fell unheeded from his hands.
“It has never been my wish that any coldness should come between us; you know that, Nattie,” he replied earnestly. “From our first acquaintance, the old acquaintance over the wire, you have held the same place in my heart!”
“The place next to Cyn!” was Nattie’s involuntary bitter thought, but she instantly stifled the feeling, and
