“Oh, _don’t_!” she breathed; as though protesting against sacrilege. “Gee! Was I off the blamed key, again?” he asked. “No, no,” she answered, the wonder-light dying from her face as the spell dissolved. “It’s all right,” she went on, seeing his chagrin. “It’s all right. I’m sorry I was cross. You were so busy with the boat you didn’t get a chance to notice what a magic lake this is we’ve come into; or you couldn’t have broken the charm. Look! Can’t you see Siegfried running through the hemlocks, on his way to Mime’s cave? And that band of dead gray tamaracks down there with the single flaming maple in the foreground! Isn’t it like an army of tree-ghosts with the red standard in its van?” So she prattled on, seeking to keep him from seeing how he had jarred upon her mood. But he knew, none the less. And he realized that there were times, even on vacation, when one must be silent. But what those times might be he could not guess. Nor did he dare ask. When next day they climbed the Crags and looked down on the gleaming lake with the scattered green of its islands, she looked at him in eager expectation of his delight. He surveyed the lake in stony silence. Then let his gaze run expressionless over the lines of mountain ramparts far to southward that rose in ever higher swells until the farthest was half lost in haze. No word did he speak. He felt he was rising to the occasion. If one must not speak on Eldon Lake at sunset it followed that one should be equally reticent on the Crags by the brighter light of morning. “Say something!” she commanded, keenly disappointed at his apathy. “Noo York must be somewheres in a line with that biggest mountain over there to the south,” he hazarded; glad to learn that the present was, for some reason, not one of those mysterious speechless occasions.