SAYRE had been fishing for some time with the usual result when the
slightest rustle of foliage caught his ear. He looked up. She was
standing directly behind him.
He got to his feet immediately and pulled off his cap. That was too bad;
he was better looking with it on his head.
"I wondered whether you'd come again," he said, so simply and naturally
that the girl, whose grey eyes had become intent on his scanty hair with
a surprised and pained expression, looked directly into his smiling and
agreeable face.
"Did you come to fish this pool?" he asked. "You are very welcome to. _I_
can't catch anything."
"Why do you think that I am out fishing?" she asked in a curiously clear,
still voice--very sweet and young--but a voice that seemed to grow out of
the silence instead of to interrupt it.
"You are fishing, are you not? or at least you came here to fish last
evening?" he said.
"Why do you think so?"
"You had a net."
He expected her to say that it was a hammock which she was trailing
through the woods in search of two convenient saplings on which to hang
it.