Colonel Phillips’ daughters were enjoying life to the full in their long summer outing on the St. Lawrence. The older, Elise, had just finished with the schools and was free from many of the restraints which the strict and old-fashioned ideas of her mother had put upon her during her girlhood, and was filled with a lively enjoyment of her first untrammelled association with the males of her kind. Helen was still a girl, and her mother yet threw about her all the guards and fences that properly hedge about the days of maidenhood. But this did not in the slightest check the flow of Helen’s joy in life, for the matter of sex in her associates was not an element in her happiness. Boy or girl, it mattered not to her, if her fellow in the hour’s sport was quick-witted, quick-moving and mischief-loving. The extent of her thoughts of love was that it and its victims were most excellent objects of banter and ridicule; and she found the incipient affair between Elise and Evans Rutledge a source of much fun. "Are you a hero?" she once asked Mr. Rutledge solemnly. "Not to my own knowledge," Rutledge answered. "Why?" "Because if you are you may be my brother sometime. Elise likes you a little, I think, and she thinks your hair would curl beautifully if you didn’t crop it so close—but you will have to be a hero. You needn’t fear Mr. Morgan. He failed to be a hero when he had the chance, and now his chance is gone. Nobody but a hero can interest Elise for keeps." "When did Morgan have his chance?" asked Rutledge, amused at the mischief-maker’s plain speaking. "He went to Venezuela in papa’s regiment, but never had a shot fired at him the whole time he was gone. That’s what he did. Elise cannot love a man like that." "Perhaps it was not his fault. He may have been detailed to such duties as kept him away from the shots." "Yes, I think he says he was; but what of that? He wasn’t in the fighting, and that’s what it takes to make a hero. Oh, I wish I were a man. I would ride a horse and hunt lions and tigers, and I would have gone to the war in Venezuela and nobody’s orders would have kept me from the firing-line—I believe that’s what papa calls it—the place where all the fun and danger is. When papa talks about it I can hear my heart beat. Elise says she wouldn’t be a man for anything; but I’ve heard her say that she could love a man if he was a _man_—brave and strong—you know—a man who did things. I would prefer to do the things myself. I wouldn’t love any man I ever saw—unless he was just like papa. What regiment were you in, Mr. Rutledge?" "I wasn’t in any regiment," said Rutledge meekly. "What! Didn’t you volunteer?" asked Helen in surprise. "I did not volunteer"—a trifle defiantly. "Why?" Helen demanded scornfully. "If I had a brother and he had failed to volunteer I would never have spoken to him again! I thought all South Carolinians were fighters."