CHAPTER XV MISS DARCY COLE sat on the edge of Red Rock, swinging twenty dollars’ worth of the very smartest obtainable boots, the personal selection of Miss Gloria Greene, over two hundred feet of shimmering October air. Behind her Mr. Jacob Remsen was using the residue of the atmosphere to replenish his exhausted lungs, for he had undertaken to keep pace with his companion up the face of the declivity, with all but fatal results. It is not well for a man who has been cooped up within a city house, exerciseless and under the espionage of a minion of the law, to compete on a thirty-per-cent grade with a woman who has just come from the training of Andy Dunne. Lack of her accustomed outdoor exercise had simply lent zest to Darcy. Three days before, the rains had descended and the floods had come and kept on coming. Now, when the skies of this mountain region set out seriously to rain, the local ducks borrow mackintoshes. Several times the visitor at the Farmhouse had ventured forth, only to be promptly beaten back to shelter. There she would have led a lonely existence, for the bridal couples were weather-bound, and even the rural delivery was cut off (so that the promised letter from Gloria hadn’t arrived), had it not been for her neighbor of the Bungalow. Each morning he waded over the soaking mile, and, of course, in such weather a decent sense of hospitality compelled his hostess to keep him for luncheon and dinner. So they had come to know each other on an inevitable footing of unconscious intimacy, better, perhaps, than they normally would have done in the conventional encounters of a year’s acquaintanceship; and he played for her and she sang to him; and they discussed people and differed about art, and agreed about books and quarreled about politics and religion, and were wholly and perilously content with one another and the situation. On the afternoon of the fourth day the sun broke gloriously through, and Darcy challenged Remsen to make the precipitous ascent of the front of Red Hill. Behold her, then, at the conclusion serenely overlooking the lowland and the lake while her companion stretched out panting behind her. “This is a peak on the Siberian front,” she announced. “And I’m an outpost.” “What do you see, Sister Anne?” “Wait and I’ll tell you. An aeroplane”—she pointed to a wheeling crow above them—“has just signaled me—” (“Caw,” said the crow; “Thank you,” said Darcy and threw the bird a kiss.) “—that a regiment is coming up from below. There’s the advance guard.” She pointed down the sheer rock. Remsen moved across and looked over the edge. “That spider?” he inquired unimaginatively. “He’s just pretending to be a spider. But he’s really a spy disguised as a spider. Now the question is, Shall I drop this bomb on him?” She held a pebble above the toiling crawler. “War is hell,” observed Remsen lazily. “Why add to its horrors?”