Leonidas went back and caught his trout.  But even this triumph did not remove a vague sense of disappointment which had come over him.  He had often pictured to himself a Heaven-sent meeting with her in the woods, a walk with her, alone, where he could pick her the rarest flowers and herbs and show her his woodland friends; and it had only ended in this, and an exhibition of William Henry!  He ought to have saved her from something, and not her husband.  Yet he had no ill-feeling for Burroughs, only a desire to circumvent him, on behalf of the unprotected, as he would have baffled a hawk or a wildcat.  He went home in dismal spirits, but later that evening constructed a boyish letter of thanks to the apocryphal Belcher and told him all about—­the trout!

He brought her his letter the next day, and received hers to inclose.  She was pleasant, her own charming self again, but she seemed more interested in other things than himself, as, for instance, the docile William Henry, whose hiding-place he showed, and whose few tricks she made him exhibit to her, and which the gratified Leonidas accepted as a delicate form of flattery to himself.  But his yearning, innocent spirit detected a something lacking, which he was too proud to admit even to himself.  It was his own fault; he ought to have waited for her, and not gone for the trout!

So a fortnight passed with an interchange of the vicarious letters, and brief, hopeful, and disappointing meetings to Leonidas.  To add to his unhappiness, he was obliged to listen to sneering disparagement of his goddess from his family, and criticisms which, happily, his innocence did not comprehend.  It was his own mother who accused her of shamefully “making up” to the good-looking expressman at church last Sunday, and declared that Burroughs ought to “look after that wife of his,”—­two statements which the simple Leonidas could not reconcile.  He had seen the incident, and only thought her more lovely than ever.  Why should not the expressman think so too?  And yet the boy was not happy; something intruded upon his sports, upon his books, making them dull and vapid, and yet that something was she!  He grew pale and preoccupied.  If he had only some one in whom to confide—­some one who could explain his hopes and fears.  That one was nearer than he thought!

It was quite three weeks since the rattlesnake incident, and he was wandering moodily over Casket Ridge.  He was near the Casket, that abrupt upheaval of quartz and gneiss, shaped like a coffer, from which the mountain took its name.  It was a favorite haunt of Leonidas, one of whose boyish superstitions was that it contained a treasure of gold, and one of whose brightest dreams had been that he should yet discover it.  This he did not do to-day, but looking up from the rocks that he was listlessly examining, he made the almost as thrilling discovery that near him on the trail was a distinguished-looking stranger.