Diane of the Green Van

"Neither have I!" exclaimed Philip ruefully.

The girl's eyes widened.

"How very singular!" she said.

"It is indeed!" admitted Philip.

"You must be an exceedingly hapless young man!" she commented with serious disapproval. "I imagine your life must be a monotonous round of disaster and excitement!"

"Fortuitously," owned Philip, "it's improving!"

Piqued by his irresistible good humor in adversity, Diane eyed him severely.

"Are you so in the habit of being mysteriously stabbed in the shoulder whenever it storms," she demanded with mild sarcasm, "that you can retain an altogether pernicious good humor?"

Philip's eyes glinted oddly.

"I'm a mere novice," he admitted lightly. "If my shoulder didn't throb so infernally," he added thoughtfully, "I'd lose all faith in the escapade--it's so weird and mysterious. A crackle--a lunge--a knife in the dark--and behold! I am here, exceedingly grateful and hungry despite the melodrama."

To which Diane, raising beautifully arched and wondering eyebrows, did not reply. Philip, furtively marking the firm brown throat above the scarlet sweater, and the vivid gypsy color beneath the laughing dusk of Diane's eyes, devoutly thanked his lucky star that Fate had seen fit to curb the air of delicate hostility with which she had left him on the Westfall lake. Well, Emerson was right, decided Philip. There is an inevitable law of compensation. Even a knife in the dark has compensations.

"Johnny," said Diane presently, briskly disinterring some baked potatoes and a baked fish from a cairn of hot stones covered with grass, "is off examining last night's trail of melodrama. He's greatly excited. Let me pour you some coffee. I sincerely hope you're not too fastidious for tin cups?"

"A tin cup," said Philip with engaging candor, "has always been a secret ambition of mine. I once acquired one at somebody's spring hut--er--circumstances compelled me to relinquish it. It was really a very nice cup too and very new and shiny. Since then, until now, my life, alas! has been tin-cupless."

Diane carved the smoking fish in ominous silence.

"Do you know," she said at length, "I've felt once or twice that your anecdotes are too apt and--er--sparkling to be overburdened with truth. Your mechanician, for instance--"

Philip laughed and reddened. The mechanician, as a desperate means of prolonging conversation, had served his purpose somewhat disastrously.

"Hum!" said he lamely.

"I shan't forget that mechanician!" said Diane decidedly.

"This now," vowed Philip uncomfortably, "is a real fish!"

Diane laughed, a soft clear laugh that to Philip's prejudiced ears had more of music in it than the murmur of the river or the clear, sweet piping of the woodland birds.

"It is," she agreed readily. "Johnny caught him in the river and I cooked him."