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in Dutch Belt cattle and in the breeding of polo ponies; but also, since the mountain brooks were alive with trout, he had a fishing lodge a day’s ride from his ranch house. A common interest in angling drew him and Harland together.
Harland had caught salmon in Newfoundland and on the Resti-gouche, and Robie was eager for the advice and instruction which the other was able to give. Robie in turn described the angling in the waters he knew; and he insisted that Harland and Danny plan to come out next summer and sample the sport there.
    Harland said they would like to come, but he assumed that would end the matter. Summer friendships and summer flirtations were pleasant while they lasted and rich in promises, but they were apt to fade with the first parting; and easy invitations were easily forgotten by the giver.
    He and Danny had a good week on the Becscie. The rest of the summer they spent at Back of the Moon. When Harland was a boy his father put him every summer in charge of a woodsman named Leick Thorne, and he and Leick went adventuring, sometimes for days at a time, into the forest lands near the Harland summer home. On one of these expeditions, ascending a turbulent brook through young second growth, they came to a lake like a half moon bent around the foot of a rugged hill. The hidden beauty of the spot delighted Harland, and when later he and Leick brought his father to see the place, the older man in a characteristic enthusiasm bought the land. Leick and Harland spent the next summer there, building a log cabin near the outlet, putting in a dam to maintain the lake at a good level and a boathouse in which to store a skiff and a canoe. Harland, since his father’s death, had come to call the place Back of the Moon, because no one except himself and Danny and Leick nowadays ever saw it.
    He and Danny stayed there, after their return from Anticosti, till September. The two brothers were alone in the world, Harland some seventeen years the older. Their father had died just before Harland went to college. Mr. Harland’s income — he was a lawyer — had been substantial, but he left only a house on Chestnut Street in Boston, and an annuity barely sufficient to support Mrs. Harland and Danny and to pay Harland’s bills at Harvard. Mrs. Harland, who had always been querulous, after her husband’s death became under the pinch of semi-poverty
increasingly fretful; and Harland’s four years in Cambridge were, as a result of her complaints at the necessity of financing his education, shadowed by a resentful sense of guilt. He felt himself on the defensive; and as soon as he was graduated, he found employment on the Boston Transcript.
    As a sophomore, Harland had fallen passionately in love with a girl named Enid Sothern; but since he could not hope to be married until he should become self-supporting, he and she could only plan, and could not seize, the future. Nevertheless they spent every possible hour together, and, for a while, in an equal intoxication; but a young and leaping fire must have fresh fuel or die down. The ardent caresses which never reached a climax lost their savor, and the week before Harland’s graduation, Enid told him with a pretty ruefulness that she would marry another man. Harland, when the first shock to his vanity had passed, assured himself that he felt a deep and genuine relief. Nevertheless, like a betrayed husband, he dreaded facing either the smiles of his friends or their loyal sympathy; so he spent many solitary evenings at home. He had won distinction in English at Harvard, and writing was his natural bent; and to occupy his empty hours he began to write a novel. He put three years of painstaking labor into the book, and as is apt to be the case with first novels, this one was autobiographical, himself the hero. He called it First Love, but his heroine — Enid almost undisguised — was so little endearing that the rupture between them gave the book