She caught the spirit of the hour. "Come, dearest, let's see if we can't outwalk him." Philip ran up ahead in great glee. "If you get tired, young lady, I'll carry you," Harcourt called after him. "I can carry my own se'f," was the proud answer. "That will fix her," said Harcourt. "I never saw a youngster so afraid of being helped." They walked back to the broad walk running along the bay front and turned east. The walk was some distance back from the water here and lay between clumps of white birches left to their natural irregularity, but growing so thick that they formed a shadowy aisle for them to walk through. "Now, I will be showman. This house," pointing to a square-built yellow frame house with verandas on three sides, "they say is one of the oldest on the grounds--one of the pioneers, in fact--but it doesn't look it." "It certainly has an air of solid comfort, and its owner must have had first choice of sites. See those birches there at the east--" She broke off to say excitedly, "Oh, Philip, look! Did you see that dear little squirrel? there, running up the tree." "'Philip'!" John Harcourt said to himself. "Well, that's queer!" He did not refer to it when they started on, and she was plainly unaware that she had used the name, but he laid it away in his memory for future reference. Philip!... Bess had said-- In gayest mood they wandered on down the bay until they came to Roaring Brook. Here, taking Philip's hand, Harcourt led the way under low-hanging boughs to a foot-path which took them straight into Nature's solitudes. A board walk (which seemed almost an impertinence in its newness--a parvenue except for its considerateness in walking around instead of over the gentry of the forest) followed the windings of a stream dark and shadowy. In its shallows swam schools of minnows which they watched from the rustic bridges, and flecks of sunlight fell upon it in patches here and there. They were in a tanglewood of tall timber--mammoth cedars that looked centuries old, and lofty elms and maples and hemlocks lifting their heads defiantly. But it was a pitiful defiance after all, for on every side lay fallen giants that had succumbed as they must one day succumb to a force stronger than themselves, and their stricken forms, their outstretched arms told of the vanquishment. Not even the mosses and the friendly vines clambering from limb to limb could hide their shame. "Oh, this is nature's tragedy!" cried Margaret. He had observed in her a habit of endowing inanimate objects with life, and suffering or rejoicing with them. "They had to give up! They simply had to give up to a power that was mightier than they!" "If they had only bent," he said, "they might have been standing yet." "How can an oak bend?" she cried. "Even a tree must live according to its nature, and then--when the storm overpowers it--go down. So must we all."