Once, under Austin's and young Craig's supervision, she tried shore-bird shooting; but the first broken wing from the gun on her left settled the thing for ever for her, and the horror of the blood-sprinkled, kicking mass of feathers haunted her dreams for a week. Youths, however, continued to hover numerously about her. They sat in soulful rows upon the veranda at Silverside; they played guitars at her in canoes, accompanying the stringy thrumming with the peculiarly exasperating vocal noises made only by very young undergraduates; they rode with her and Nina; they pervaded her vicinity with a tireless constancy amounting to obsession. She liked it well enough; she was as interested in everything as usual; as active at the nets, playing superbly, and with all her heart in the game--while it lasted; she swung her slim brassy with all the old-time fire and satisfaction in the clean, sharp whack, as the ball flew through the sunshine, rising beautifully in a long, low trajectory against the velvet fair-green. It was unalloyed happiness for her to sit her saddle, feeling under her the grand stride of her powerful hunter on a headlong cross-country gallop; it was purest pleasure for her to lean forward in her oilskins, her eyes almost blinded with salt spray, while the low motor-boat rushed on and on through cataracts of foam, and the heaving, green sea-miles fled away, away, in the hissing furrow of the wake. Truly, for her, the world was still green, the sun bright, the high sky blue; but she had not forgotten that the earth had been greener, the sun brighter, the azure above her more splendid--once upon a time--like the first phrase of a tale that is told. And if she were at times listless, absent-eyed, subdued--a trifle graver, or unusually silent, seeking the still paths of the garden as though in need of youthful meditation and the quiet of the sunset hour, she never doubted that that tale would be retold for her again. Only--alas!--the fair days were passing, and the russet rustle of October sounded already among the curling leaves in the garden; and he had been away a long time--a very long time. And she could not understand. On one of Austin's week-end visits, the hour for conjugal confab having arrived and husband and wife locked in the seclusion of their bedroom--being old-fashioned enough to occupy the same--he said, with a trace of irritation in his voice: "I don't know where Phil is, or what he's about. I'm wondering--he's got the Selwyn conscience, you know--what he's up to--and if it's any kind of dam-foolishness. Haven't you heard a word from him, Nina?" Nina, in her pretty night attire, had emerged from her dressing-room, locked out Kit-Ki and her maid, and had curled up in a big, soft armchair, cradling her bare ankles in her hand. "I haven't heard from him," she said. "Rosamund saw him in Washington--passed him on the street. He was looking horridly thin and worn, she wrote. He did not see her."