“Quite so.  Only you are the first member of your delightful sex who has ever perceived it.  You are a perceptive person, Mrs. Spence.”

It was the fourth day of their Business Honeymoon.  Four days ago they had landed from the cheerful little coast steamer whose chattering load of summer campers they had left behind on the route.  For four sun-bright days and dew-sweet nights they had found themselves .sole possessors of a bay so lovely that it seemed to have emerged bodily from a green and opal dream.

“‘Friendly Bay,’ they calls it,” a genial deckhand told them, grinning.  “But you folks will be the only friends anywheres about.  There’s a sort of farm across the point, though, and maybe you could hit the trail by climbing, if you get too fed up with the scenery.”

“Oh, we shan’t want any Compaq,” said the new Mrs. Spence innocently—­a remark so disappointing in its unembarrassed frankness that the deck-hand lost interest and decided that they were “just relations” after all.

They had carried their camp with them, and, from where they now sat, they could see its canvas gleaming ivory white against its background of green.  Desire’s eyes, as she raised them from her name-building, lingered upon it proudly.  It was such a wonderful camp!—­her first experience of what money, unconsidered save as a purchasing agent, can do.  Even her personal outfit was something of a revelation.  How deliciously keen and new was this consciousness of clothes—­the smart high-laced boots, the soft, sand-colored coat and skirt, the knickers which felt so easy and so trim, the cool, silk shirt with its wide collar, the dainty, intimate things beneath!  She would have been less than woman, had the possession of these things failed to meet some need,—­some instinct, deep within, which her old, bare life had daily mortified.

And it had all been so easy, so natural!  How could she ever have hesitated to make the change?  Even her pride was left to her, intact.  He, her friend, had given and she had taken, but in this there had been no spoiling sense of obligation, for, presently, she too was to give and to give unstintedly:  new strength and skill seemed already tingling in her firm, quick hands; new vigor and inspiration stirred in her eager brain—­and both hands and brain were to be her share of giving—­her partnership offering in this pact of theirs.  She was eager, eager to begin.

But already they had been four days in camp without a beginning.  So far they had not even looked for the trail which was to lead them to the cabin of Hawk-Eye Charlie whose store of Indian lore had been the reason for their upcoast journey.  This delay of the expeditionary party was due to no fault of its secretary.  During the past four days she had proposed the search for the trail four times, one proposal per day.  And each day the chief expeditioner had voted a postponement.  The chief expeditioner was lazy.  At least that was the excuse he made.