"I thought--I--could--make--it!" gasped Susan, laughing, when he swam after her, across the pool, and towed her ignominiously home.
"Susan, you're a fool!" scolded Billy, when they were safe on the bank, and Susan, spreading her wet hair about her, siren-wise, answered meekly: "Oh, I know it!"
On a certain Saturday Anna and Philip climbed down from the stage, and the joys of the campers were doubled as they related their adventures and shared all their duties and delights. Susan and Anna talked nearly all night, lying in their canvas beds, on a porch flooded with moonlight, and if Susan did not mention Billy, nor Anna allude to the great Doctor Hoffman, they understood each other for all that.
The next day they all walked up beyond the ranch-house, and followed the dripping flume to the dam. And here, beside a wide sheet of blue water, they built their fire, and had their lunch, and afterward spent a long hour in the water. Quail called through the woods, and rabbits flashed out of sight at the sound of human voices, and once, in a silence, a doe, with a bright-eyed fawn clinking after her on the stones, came down to the farther shore for a drink.
"You ought to live this sort of life all the time, Sue!" Billy said idly, as they sat sunning themselves on the wide stone bulkhead that held back the water.
"I? Why?" asked Susan, marking the smooth cement with a wet forefinger.
"Because you're such a kid, Sue--you like it all so much!"
"Knowing what you know of me, Bill, I wonder that you can think of me as young at all," the girl answered drily, suddenly somber and raising shamed eyes to his.
"How do you mean?" he stammered, and then, suddenly enlightened, he added scornfully, "Oh, Lord!"
"That---" Susan said quietly, still marking the hot cement, "will keep me from ever--ever being happy, Bill---" Her voice thickened, and she stopped speaking.
"I don't look at that whole episode as you do, Sue," Billy said gruffly after a moment's embarrassed silence. "I don't believe chance controls those things. I often think of it when some man comes to me with a hard-luck story. His brother cheated him, and a factory burned down, and he was three months sick in a hospital-- yes, that may all be true! But follow him back far enough and you'll find he was a mean man from the very start, ruined a girl in his home town, let his wife support his kids. It's years ago now perhaps, but his fate is simply working out its natural conclusion. Somebody says that character IS fate, Sue,--you've always been sweet and decent and considerate of other people, and your fate saved you through that. You couldn't have done anything wrong--it's not IN you!"