woods, as she thought, with only moss underfoot and high green boughs overhead, Elliott lifted her foot and deliberately and with vehemence stamped it. 61 “I don’t like things!” she whispered, a little shocked at her own words. “I don’t like things!”

Then she looked up and met the amused eyes of Bruce Fearing.

For a minute the hot color flooded the girl’s face. But she seized the bull by the horns. “I am cross,” she said, “frightfully cross!” And she looked so engagingly pretty as she said it that Bruce thought he had never seen so attractive a girl.

“Anything in particular gone wrong with the universe?”

“Everything, with my part of it.” What possessed her, she wondered afterward, to say what she said next? “I never wanted to come here.”

“That so? We’ve been thinking it rather nice.”

In spite of herself, she was mollified. “It isn’t quite that, either,” she explained. “I’ve only just discovered the real trouble, 62 myself. What makes me so mad isn’t altogether the fact that I didn’t want to come up here. It’s that I hadn’t any choice. I had to come.”

The boy’s eyes twinkled. “So that’s what’s bothering you, is it? Cheer up! You had the choice of how you’d come, didn’t you?”

“How?”

“Yes. Sometimes I think that’s all the choice they give us in this world. It’s all I’ve had, anyway—how I’d do a thing.”

“You mean, gracefully or—”

“I mean—”

“Hello!” said Stannard’s voice. “What are you two chinning about before the cows come home?”