There was very little explanation. The fire blazed up and the little figure wrapped in rugs given something hot to drink. The others stood around and watched her. Gertrude, with a hard stare, turned in the firelight to Tawny. The girl was one cold glitter of gold snakes and swamp dark eyes. "Your fiancée?" she questioned, smiling. She was ironical. While the other party waited for Minga's resuscitation, the quartette started to get under way. But on the down-creek trip it was Tawny who paddled Gertrude's boat, and they soon outstripped Dunstan, who came more slowly with Cinny asleep at his feet. The moon spotted the black of the forest and spread silver on the waterways. All around the slow-moving canoes were the waiting ones, the little wood creatures who come out innocently for their pure trysts and unwitting obediences to the great laws they honestly serve. These stayed cleanly apart from the canoes with their human freight, the strange mystical human beings who are torn between their two great allegiances, the animal and the spiritual. But only Dunstan saw these things, and paddled solemnly and felt like crying and wondered what serene wisdom the summer night withheld. CHAPTER XVII A GOOD NAME The Judge had come in to dinner in a bad temper. For one thing he had been badly beaten at golf by a man who could not speak good English. This thing seemed to the Judge insufferable, a thing that should not be allowed. Fancy being beaten by the long drives and careful calculation of a hooked-nose oaf who shambled in his walk and said "acrost" and "bee-hind" and "I was to New York." The Judge was beginning to feel his age in many ways. His complete absorption in his calling made him sometimes aghast at how differently life went from what he stipulated. A nightmarish sense of suddenly awaking in an unfamiliar milieu, in surroundings peopled with beings he did not understand, who did nothing he had willed, oppressed him.