“I’ve all the inhabitants of the forest,” he answered. “Good-by. I understand you’ve accepted for the yachting party, the one Lissa is giving.” His face expressed displeasure. Thurley nodded; she had intended to escape it until this identical moment when his bland, impersonal manner was fuel for her folly. “You’ll get good ideas as to what to avoid. I have always contended that to build a virtuous wall around one’s self was questionable,—better be able to view all that is happening, good and bad, and make one’s deductions accordingly. Lissa reminds me of the basilisk serpent who could ‘look one to death.’ Have a care, Thurley; you’ve no more youth and energy to spare than most of us.” And he left her. The third reason, and this, too, was an annoying secret, was that Thurley wanted to see the Boston Valley hills and Birge’s Corners. She wanted to go home! Yet not as Thurley Precore, prima donna, but just as Thurley, as unknown but as loved as when she had raced through the village with Dan in pursuit or climbed chestnut trees to the discredit of her manners, helping make daisy chains for the primary class to carry into church on Children’s Day or working her bit of a garden with wholehearted interest and disregard of her appearance. The notion was absurd and impossible, and, as a powerful destroyer of whim, Thurley accepted the invitation to Lissa’s yachting party and cruised along the coast of Newfoundland in a yacht which had been lent to Lissa by one of her devoted pupils. The yachting party was not a pleasant affair all told. But it was interesting and exciting. Lissa herself was the discordant note, with the faculty of stirring every one up about something and then losing interest in it and being provoked if the others did not play sheep and do likewise. She had a subtle fashion of reminding every one that, after all, she was the hostess and if they wished they could all get off the yacht at any time they liked and walk home from Newfoundland! Lissa played with Mark in cat-and-mouse fashion, flirted desperately with Caleb to arouse Ernestine’s jealousy, and Caleb, who regarded her as stunning copy, resolved to transplant her bodily in her most daring combination of orange satin with black velvet streamers into his next best seller. There were ways of gaining revenge, he informed Ernestine, who stayed by herself on the upper deck, dressing in uninteresting smock affairs and talking over prosy matters with Collin Hedley and Polly, while Thurley and Mark romped about to brave Lissa’s displeasure as they made pseudo-love in audacious fashion. After four weeks of this vapid sport, every one had succeeded in getting on every one else’s nerves and the party disbanded, its members each vowing that, although so and so was a dear, they would never go away with them again, and Thurley flew on to the mountains to visit Miss Clergy and find an enforced peace in the sanitarium routine.