I hope you’re having a pleasant spree.

Oh, I forgot to tell you that one of the wall-paperers is living here at the house with us just now.  We use him so much it’s truly a good deal more convenient.  And he’s a real nice young fellow, and he plays the piano finely, and he comes from up my way.  And it seemed more neighborly anyway.  It’s so large in the house at night, just now, and so creaky in the garden.

With kindest regards, good-by for now, from RAE.

P.S.

Don’t tell your guide or any one! But Helene sent Zillah’s mother a check for fifteen hundred dollars.  I saw it with my own eyes.  And all Zillah asked for that day was just a little blue serge suit.  It seems she’d promised her kid sister a little blue serge suit for July.  And it sort of worried her.

Helene sent the little blue serge suit too!  And a hat!  The hat had bluebells on it.  Do you think when you come home—­if I haven’t spent too much money on wall-papers—­that I could have a blue hat with bluebells on it?  Excuse me for bothering you—­but you forgot to leave me enough money.

* * * * *

It was some indefinite, pleasant time on Thursday, the twenty-fifth of June, that the Senior Surgeon received this second letter.

It was Friday the twenty-sixth of June, exactly at dawn, that the Senior Surgeon started homeward.

Nobody looks very well in the dawn.  Certainly the Senior Surgeon didn’t.  Heavily as a man wading through a bog of dreams, he stumbled out of his cabin into the morning.  Under his drowsy, brooding eyes appalling shadows circled.  Behind his sunburn,—­deeper than his tan, something sinister and uncanny lurked wanly like the pallor of a soul.

Yet the Senior Surgeon had been most blamelessly abed and asleep since griddle-cake time the previous evening.

Only the mountains and the forest and the lake had been out all night.  For seventy miles of Canadian wilderness only the mountains and the forest and the lake stood actually convicted of having been out all night.  Dank and white with its vaporous vigil the listless lake kindled wanly to the new day’s breeze.  Blue with cold a precipitous mountain peak lurched craggedly home through a rift in the fog.  Drenched with mist, bedraggled with dew, a green-feathered pine tree lay guzzling insatiably at a leaf-brown pool.  Monotonous as a sob the waiting birch canoe slosh-sloshed against the beach.

There was no romantic smell of red roses in this June landscape.  Just tobacco smoke, and the faint reminiscent fragrance of fried trout, and the mournful, sizzling, pungent consciousness of a camp-fire quenched for a whole year with a tinful of wet coffee grounds.

Gliding out cautiously into the lake as though the mere splash of a paddle might shatter the whole glassy surface, the Indian Guide propounded the question that was uppermost in his mind.