"Oh no." He continued thoughtfully silent for a little while before he
resumed. "The amazing thing is that they got lost again, and that when
they tried going back to the Canucks they couldn't find the way."
"Why didn't they follow the sound of the chopping?" I asked.
"The Canucks had stopped, for the time being. Besides, Braybridge was
rather ashamed, and he thought if they went straight on they would be
sure to come out somewhere. But that was where he made a mistake. They
couldn't go on straight; they went round and round, and came on their
own footsteps--or hers, which he recognized from the narrow tread and
the dint of the little heels in the damp places."
Wanhope roused himself with a kindling eye. "That is very interesting,
the movement in a circle of people who have lost their way. It has often
been observed, but I don't know that it has ever been explained.
Sometimes the circle is smaller, sometimes it is larger, but I believe
it is always a circle."
"Isn't it," I queried, "like any other error in life? We go round and
round, and commit the old sins over again."
"That is very interesting," Wanhope allowed.
"But do lost people really always walk in a vicious circle?" Minver
asked.
Rulledge would not let Wanhope answer. "Go on, Halson," he said.
Halson roused himself from the revery in which he was sitting with
glazed eyes. "Well, what made it a little more anxious was that he had
heard of bears on that mountain, and the green afternoon light among the
trees was perceptibly paling. He suggested shouting, but she wouldn't
let him; she said it would be ridiculous if the others heard them, and
useless if they didn't. So they tramped on till--till the accident
happened."
"The accident!" Rulledge exclaimed, in the voice of our joint emotion.
"He stepped on a loose stone and turned his foot," Halson explained. "It
wasn't a sprain, luckily, but it hurt enough. He turned so white that
she noticed it, and asked him what was the matter. Of course that shut
his mouth the closer, but it morally doubled his motive, and he kept
himself from crying out till the sudden pain of the wrench was over. He
said merely that he thought he had heard something, and he had an awful
ringing in his ears; but he didn't mean that, and he started on again.
The worst was trying to walk without limping, and to talk cheerfully and
encouragingly with that agony tearing at him. But he managed somehow,
and he was congratulating himself on his success when he tumbled down in
a dead faint."
"Oh, come now!" Minver protested.
"It _is_ like an old-fashioned story, where things are operated by
accident instead of motive, isn't it?" Halson smiled with radiant
recognition.
"Fact will always imitate fiction, if you give her time enough," I said.
"Had they got back to the other picnickers?" Rulledge asked, with a
tense voice.
"In sound, but not in sight of them. She wasn't going to bring him into
camp in that state; besides, she couldn't. She got some water out of the
trout-brook they'd been fishing--more water than trout in it--and
sprinkled his face, and he came to, and got on his legs just in time to
pull on to the others, who were organizing a search-party to go after
them. From that point on she dropped Braybridge like a hot coal; and as
there was nothing of the flirt in her, she simply kept with the women,
the older girls, and the tabbies, and left Braybridge to worry along
with the secret of his turned ankle. He doesn't know how he ever got
home alive; but he did, somehow, manage to reach the wagons that had
brought them to the edge of the woods, and then he was all right till
they got to the house. But still she said nothing about his accident,
and he couldn't; and he pleaded an early start for town the next
morning, and got off to bed as soon as he could."
"I shouldn't have thought he could have stirred in the morning,"
Rulledge employed Halson's pause to say.
"Well, this beaver _had_ to," Halson said. "He was not the only early
riser. He found Miss Hazelwood at the station before him."
"What!" Rulledge shouted. I confess the fact rather roused me, too; and
Wanhope's eyes kindled with a scientific pleasure.
"She came right towards him. 'Mr. Braybridge,' says she, 'I couldn't let
you go without explaining my very strange behavior. I didn't choose to
have these people laughing at the notion of _my_ having played the part
of your preserver. It was bad enough being lost with you; I couldn't
bring you into ridicule with them by the disproportion they'd have felt
in my efforts for you after you turned your foot. So I simply had to
ignore the incident. Don't you see?' Braybridge glanced at her, and he
had never felt so big and bulky before, or seen her so slender and
little. He said, 'It _would_ have seemed rather absurd,' and he broke
out and laughed, while she broke down and cried, and asked him to
forgive her, and whether it had hurt him very much; and said she knew he
could bear to keep it from the others by the way he had kept it from her
till he fainted. She implied that he was morally as well as physically
gigantic, and it was as much as he could do to keep from taking her in
his arms on the spot."
"It would have been edifying to the groom that had driven her to the
station," Minver cynically suggested.
"Groom nothing!" Halson returned with spirit. "She paddled herself
across the lake, and walked from the boat-landing to the station."
"Jove!" Rulledge exploded in uncontrollable enthusiasm.
"She turned round as soon as she had got through with her hymn of
praise--it made Braybridge feel awfully flat--and ran back through the
bushes to the boat-landing, and--that was the last he saw of her till he
met her in town this fall."
"And when--and when--did he offer himself?" Rulledge entreated,
breathlessly. "How--"
"Yes, that's the point, Halson," Minver interposed. "Your story is all
very well, as far as it goes; but Rulledge here has been insinuating
that it was Miss Hazelwood who made the offer, and he wants you to bear
him out."
Rulledge winced at the outrage, but he would not stay Halson's answer
even for the sake of righting himself.
"I _have_ heard," Minver went on, "that Braybridge insisted on paddling
the canoe back to the other shore for her, and that it was on the way
that he offered himself." We others stared at Minver in astonishment.
Halson glanced covertly towards him with his gay eyes. "Then that wasn't
true?"
"How did you hear it?" Halson asked.
"Oh, never mind. Is it true?"
"Well, I know there's that version," Halson said, evasively. "The
engagement is only just out, as you know. As to the offer--the when and
the how--I don't know that I'm exactly at liberty to say."
"I don't see why," Minver urged. "You might stretch a point for
Rulledge's sake."
Halson looked down, and then he glanced at Minver after a furtive
passage of his eye over Rulledge's intense face. "There was something
rather nice happened after--But, really, now!"
"Oh, go on!" Minver called out in contempt of his scruple.
"I haven't the right--Well, I suppose I'm on safe ground here? It won't
go any further, of course; and it _was_ so pretty! After she had pushed
off in her canoe, you know, Braybridge--he'd followed her down to the
shore of the lake--found her handkerchief in a bush where it had caught,
and he held it up, and called out to her. She looked round and saw it,
and called back: 'Never mind. I can't return for it now.' Then
Braybridge plucked up his courage, and asked if he might keep it, and
she said 'Yes,' over her shoulder, and then she stopped paddling, and
said: 'No, no, you mustn't, you mustn't! You can send it to me.' He
asked where, and she said: 'In New York--in the fall--at the
Walholland.' Braybridge never knew how he dared, but he shouted after
her--she was paddling on again--'May I _bring_ it?' and she called over
her shoulder again, without fully facing him, but her profile was
enough: 'If you can't get any one to bring it for you.' The words barely
reached him, but he'd have caught them if they'd been whispered; and he
watched her across the lake and into the bushes, and then broke for his
train. He was just in time."
Halson beamed for pleasure upon us, and even Minver said: "Yes, that's
rather nice." After a moment he added: "Rulledge thinks she put it
there."
"You're too bad, Minver," Halson protested. "The charm of the whole
thing was her perfect innocence. She isn't capable of the slightest
finesse. I've known her from a child, and I know what I say."
"That innocence of girlhood," Wanhope said, "is very interesting. It's
astonishing how much experience it survives. Some women carry it into
old age with them. It's never been scientifically studied--"
"Yes," Minver allowed. "There would be a fortune for the novelist who
could work a type of innocence for all it was worth. Here's Acton always
dealing with the most rancid flirtatiousness, and missing the sweetness
and beauty of a girlhood which does the cheekiest things without knowing
what it's about, and fetches down its game whenever it shuts its eyes
and fires at nothing. But I don't see how all this touches the point
that Rulledge makes, or decides which finally made the offer."
"Well, hadn't the offer already been made?"
"But how?"
"Oh, in the usual way."
"What is the usual way?"
"I thought everybody knew _that_. Of course, it was _from_ Braybridge
finally, but I suppose it's always six of one and half a dozen of the
other in these cases, isn't it? I dare say he couldn't get any one to
take her the handkerchief. My dinner?" Halson looked up at the silent
waiter, who had stolen upon us and was bowing towards him.
"Look here, Halson," Minver detained him, "how is it none of the rest of
us have heard all those details?"
"_I_ don't know where you've been, Minver. Everybody knows the main
facts," Halson said, escaping.
Wanhope observed, musingly: "I suppose he's quite right about the
reciprocality of the offer, as we call it. There's probably, in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a perfect understanding before
there's an explanation. In many cases the offer and the acceptance must
really be tacit."
"Yes," I ventured, "and I don't know why we're so severe with women when
they seem to take the initiative. It's merely, after all, the call of
the maiden bird, and there's nothing lovelier or more endearing in
nature than that."
"Maiden bird is good, Acton," Minver approved. "Why don't you institute
a class of fiction where the love-making is all done by the maiden
birds, as you call them--or the widow birds? It would be tremendously
popular with both sexes. It would lift an immense responsibility off the
birds who've been expected to shoulder it heretofore if it could be
introduced into real life."
Rulledge fetched a long, simple-hearted sigh. "Well, it's a charming
story. How well he told it!"
The waiter came again, and this time signalled to Minver.
"Yes," he said, as he rose. "What a pity you can't believe a word Halson
says."
"Do you mean--" we began simultaneously.
"That he built the whole thing from the ground up, with the start that
we had given him. Why, you poor things! Who could have told him how it
all happened? Braybridge? Or the girl? As Wanhope began by saying,
people don't speak of their love-making, even when they distinctly
remember it."
"Yes, but see here, Minver!" Rulledge said, with a dazed look. "If it's
all a fake of his, how came _you_ to have heard of Braybridge paddling
the canoe back for her?"
"That was the fake that tested the fake. When he adopted it, I _knew_ he
was lying, because I was lying myself. And then the cheapness of the
whole thing! I wonder that didn't strike you. It's the stuff that a
thousand summer-girl stories have been spun out of. Acton might have
thought he was writing it!"
He went away, leaving us to a blank silence, till Wanhope managed to
say: "That inventive habit of mind is very curious. It would be
interesting to know just how far it imposes on the inventor himself--how
much he believes of his own fiction."
"I don't see," Rulledge said, gloomily, "why they're so long with my
dinner." Then he burst out: "I believe every word Halson said! If
there's any fake in the thing, it's the fake that Minver owned to."