She scrambled through a willow tangle, stopped on the farther side to listen, and smiled when the water talked to her with no interruption of human voices.
"And Doug thinks he's a real nature lover!" she commented, throwing her cushions down into a grassy little hollow under the bank.

"But if he would rather hear Kate elocute about it than to lie and listen to the real thing, he's nothing more or less than a nature pirate." She curled herself down among the cushions and stared up through the slender willow branches into the top of an alder that leaned over the bank and dangled its finger-tip branches playfully toward her.
"You pretty thing!" she cooed to it.

"What does ail people, that they sit around and talk about you and make up rhymes about you, when you just want them to come out and love you! You darling! Words only make you cheap.

Now whisper to me, all about when you woke up last spring and found the sun warm and waiting--Go on--tell me about it, and what you said to the creek, and all." Having listened to Kate's dramatic rendition of the poem he liked, the professor went over and made himself comfortable in the hammock and began talking again about the fire.

It was a magnificent spectacle, he declared, although he was really too close to it to obtain the best view.