"You've got one, now; youngest I ever saw. I wish I had it--haw, haw! Where'd you find it? I doubt if ever in your life you've had any real contact with any real guile." "I have," said Hugh, very quiet, very angry, yet with a joy of disclosure, communicative at last by sheer stress of so much kept unsaid. "And I've never got over it." "Well, well! When was that?" "All through the most important ten years of my life." "Of your life! Good gracious! Which were they?" "The first ten. A guile seemingly so guileless that yours, compared with it, is botch work." The two were still looking into each other's eyes when the latch clicked and John Courteney stepped in. XXV "PLEASE ASSEMBLE" Out from behind Fritz Island the _Votaress_ swept northward into a deluge of light from a sun just finishing the first half of his afternoon decline. Before her lay, far and wide, an expanse of river and shore so fair, without a noticeable sign of man's touch, that one traveller of exceptional moral daring--conversing with the Gilmores and Ramsey--personified the scene as "Nature in siesta." At the steamer's approach the picture--or, as the daring traveller might have insisted, the basking sleeper--seemed to awaken and in a repletion of smiling content to stir and stretch and every here and there to darken and lighten by turns as though closing and opening upon the intruder a multitude of eyes as unnumbered as those of a human sort that looked on the scene, the sleeper, from the beautiful boat. So for several minutes. Then the _Votaress_ curved into the west till the great twin shadows of her chimneys crept athwart the pilot-house and texas, while more than one passenger of the kind who tell all they know to whoever will hear said that yonder bright mass of cottonwoods and willows, bathing in sunlight directly up the stream, with open water shimmering all round it, was Glasscock Island; that Glasscock Towhead lay hidden behind it just above, and that a towhead was an island in the making. The whole view was such a stimulus to the outpouring of sentiment as well as of information, that one young pair, each succeeding flutter of whose heart-strings was more tenderly entangling them, agreed in undertone that the river's incessant bendings were steps of a Jacob's ladder with these resplendent white steamers for ascending and descending angels.