For the summer world, sweet with the scent of wild flowers, was very young, with young leaves, young grass and flowering, sun-warm hedges, and beyond the Sherrill place on the wooded hill, the sun flamed yellow through the hemlocks.
"Oh, Johnny Jutes! Oh, Johnny Jutes!" sang the girl happily, with the color of the wild rose in her sun-brown cheeks.

"It's good--it's good to be alive!" With a chuckle of enthusiasm Johnny cracked his whip and opined that it was.
Now even as the great green van rolled forth upon the country roads, bound for an idyllic spot by the river where Diane had planned to camp a week, two men appeared upon the wide, white-pillared Sherrill porch, smoking and idly admiring the bluish hills and the rolling meadowlands below bright with morning sunlight.

To the east lay the silver glimmer of a tree-fringed lake; beyond, a church spire among the trees and a winding country road traveled by the solitary van of green and white.
"A singular conveyance, is it not, Poynter ?" inquired the older man, his careful articulation blurred by a pronounced foreign accent.

Staring intently at the sunlit road, he added: "Is it a common mode of travel--here in America ?" The younger man, a lean, sinewy chap with singularly fine eyes of blue above lean, tanned cheeks, frowned thoughtfully.
"By no means," said he pleasantly.

"Indeed it's quite new to me.