The strawberry beds were visited, and-- "Shall we go down to the river and have a look at the scene of our first acquaintance?" asked Peter; "we have plenty of time before tea." But, seeing the half-ashamed reluctance in Hilda's eyes, "Well, not there, then, but to the river; there are even prettier places. Our boating-house is a mile from yours, and I'll give you a paddle in my Canadian canoe,--such a pretty thing. You must sit very still, you know, or you'll spill us both into the river." "I shouldn't mind, as you would be there," laughed Hilda; and so they went through the sunlit golden green of the beechwoods, and Hilda made the acquaintance of the Canadian canoe and of a mile or so of river that she had never seen before, and she and Peter talked together like the best and oldest of friends. CHAPTER VII Odd's life of melancholy and good-humored resignation was cut short with an abruptness so startling that the needlessness of further resignation deepened the melancholy to a lasting habit of mind. The melancholy that lies in the resignation to a ruinous mistake, the acceptance of ruin, and the nerving oneself to years of self-control and kindly endurance may well become a fine and bracing stoicism, but the shock of the irretrievably lost opportunity, the eternally irremediable mistake, gave a sensitive mind a morbid faculty of self-questioning and self-doubt that sapped the very springs of energy and confidence. Mary's wedding came off in July, and when Mr. and Mrs. Apswith were gone for two months' cruising in a friend's yacht about the North Sea, Peter set to work with vigor. "The Sonnet" was in a year's time to make him famous in the world of letters. In September, Mary and her husband went to their house in Surrey, and there Peter paid her a visit. Alicia found a trip to Carlsbad with friends more desirable. The friends were thoroughly irreproachable--a middle-aged peer and his young and pretty but very sensible wife.