Yet Donas Guthrie's original remark had been purely whimsical and distinctly apropos of nothing at all. The careless knocking of his pipe against the piazza's primitive railing had certainly not prepared the way for any particularly vital statement. "Up--to--the--time--he's--thirty," drawled the pleasant, deep, distinctly masculine voice, "up--to--the--time--he's--thirty, no man has done the things that he's really wanted to do--but only the things that happened to come his way. He's forced into business to please his father, and cajoled into the Episcopal Church to gratify his mother, and bullied into red neckties to pacify his sister Isabel. But once having reached the grown-up, level-headed, utterly independent age of thirty, a man's a fool, I tell you, who doesn't sit down deliberately, and roll up his sleeves, and square his jaw, and list out, one by one, the things that _he_ wants in the presumable measure of lifetime that's left him--and go ahead and get them!" "Why, surely," said the young woman, without the slightest trace of surprise. Something in her matter-of-fact acquiescence made Donas Guthrie smile a trifle shrewdly. "Oh! So you've got your own list all made out?" he quizzed. Around the rather tired-looking corners of Esther Davidson's mouth the tiniest possible flicker of amusement began to show. "No, not all made out," she answered frankly. "You see, I wasn't thirty--until yesterday." Stooping with cheerful unconcern to blow a little fluff of tobacco ash from his own khaki-colored knees to hers, Guthrie eyed her delightedly from under his heavy brows. "Oh, this is working out very neatly and pleasantly," he mused, all agrin. "Ever since you joined our camping party at Laramie, jumping off the train as white-faced and out of breath as though you'd been running to catch up with us all the way from Boston--indeed, ever since you first wrote me at Morristown, asking full particulars about the whole expedition and begging us to go to the Sierra Nevadas instead and blotted 'Sierra' twice and crossed it out once--and then in final petulance spelled it with three 'r's,' I've been utterly consumed with curiosity to know just how old you are." "Thirty years--and one morning," said the young woman--absent-mindedly. "W-h-e-w!" gasped Guthrie. "But that's a ripe old age! Surely, you've no time to lose!" Rummaging through his pockets with mock intensity he thrust into her hands, at last, a small pad of paper and a pencil. "Now quick!" he insisted. "Make out your list before it's too late to profit by it!" The woman was evidently perfectly willing to comply with every playful aspect of his mood, but it was equally evident that she did not intend to be hurried about it. Quite perversely she began to dally with the pencil. "But, you see, I don't know exactly just what kind of a list you mean," she protested.