"Well! I should say! He was hanging between hawk and buzzard--if ever a fellow was," happened to be Stud's moved comment as, clinging to that lowered rope, he was hoisted, too, through that covert opening, the loyal little lamp upon his breast paling now into a penny candle held towards the sun. But the rescuer's halo did not pale. It burnished the picnic luncheon which followed, encircling, rainbow-like, little Jessie who basked in it more than did the rebellious hero, pelted with wild flowers by the girls--as symbolic of other bouquets. "Oh! let up--let up--will you? Those big fellows will take me for the 'goat'--somebody's 'goat'!" protested Stud helplessly, striving to direct attention from himself by training it upon a straggling group of distant youths, really too far off to take stock of what was going on among the merry picnic party. But Pemrose was taking stock of them. Her widening eyes, her reddening cheeks, the little piqued shiver that electrified her chin, told that one figure--one figure--called for recognition; called for it, indeed, so loudly that it couldn't be denied him. Every member of that group--a canoeing party, a wading party, it was, just landed from the near-by river, the blue Housatonic--was a blaze of color. But the sturdiest among them was simply barbaric. The warm sunlight of May dripped golden from his nickum shoulders, bronzed to the hue of a statue, bathed his bare knees and feet, his khaki shorts, the flame of an apricot jersey, the black and yellow cap,--the sheaf of mayflowers within his arm. "Oh! how boys--big boys--do revel in color. A girl--any girl I ever knew--is demure in her taste beside them," murmured the Camp Fire Guardian, with amused, motherly tolerance. "Pshaw! I think it's hor-rid. So flashy!" snapped Pemrose; Jack at a Pinch had made gorgeous his incivility and was parading it before her eyes. "Oh, boy! Look at that middle fellow. He'd have a grosbeak 'skun a mile'!" gasped Stud, following the direction of her glance, with a virtuous consciousness of his own cave-soiled khaki, moderately lit by merit badge and service stripe. "'Grosbeak!' Oh, but I love grosbeaks! And all that color--why! it paints the landscape," came flutteringly from Aponi, the White Birch Butterfly, least Priscilla-like in her tastes of the Group, when she was not in Camp Fire green, or soft-toned ceremonial dress. "Maybe 'twill paint the blues in old Tory Cave, if we run across them there," put in Tomoke, maiden of the flambeau and the fire-talk. "They certainly are a perfect 'scream', those big boys," her eyes merrily following that clamor of color now wending back towards the canoes. "Humph! they'd have to 'go some' to leaven the blues of Tory Cave," remarked the Scoutmaster, laughingly addressing himself to a roll. "The biggest bonfire on earth wouldn't half dry the cave-tears there."