if I could come. And Emily--Emily Carringford, you know--Uncle
Austen's wife, wrote too, asking me to stay with them."

"So," said he, "you go--"

"Monday. I've been talking to your mother, and she's willing, if
Captain Leroy and you are; I came out to ask you--I am always to be
asking favors of your family, it seems--if you will let me leave Molly
here instead of at the hotel. Celeste can attend to everything."

"Why not?" asked Willy.

"It's--it's a business proposition," said Alexina. But it took a bit
of courage to bring it out.

"Is it?" said he.

"Or I can't do it, you know."

They had reached the lake and were sitting like children on the edge
of the pier. The water was ruffled, the incoming waves white-crested,
and the wind was soughing a little around the boat-house behind them.
He was breaking bits off a twig and flinging them out to see them
drift in.

"Great country this," he said, "that can't produce a pebble for a
fellow to fling."

He looked off toward the shining, shadowy distance, where the moon
gleamed against the mists. "You are"--then he changed the form of his
question--"are you very rich?"

"Leave the very out, and, yes, I suppose I am rich," said Alexina.

"You are so--well--yourself," he said, "sometimes I find myself
forgetting it."

The girl swallowed once, twice, as if from effort to speak. She was
looking off, too, against the far shore. "Is it a thing to have to be
remembered?" then she asked.

"Isn't it?" said King William, turning on her suddenly. There was a
sharp harshness in his tones. "I wish to God it wasn't."

She got up, and he sprang up, too, facing her. Suddenly she stamped
her foot. The wind, rising to a gale now, was blowing her hair about
her face and she was angry. It made her beautiful. She might have been
a Valkyr, tall, wind-tossed.

But the sob in her voice was human. "I've had Uncle Austen say such
things to me in his fear I might let other people forget it, and a
girl I cared for at school let it come between us, but I thought
you--I had a right to think you were bigger. Your mother is, oh, yes,
she is, and your father is. Not that I despise the other, either." She
lifted her head defiantly. "It's a grand and liberating thing, though
it was shackles on me in Uncle Austen's hands. I don't despise it; I
couldn't; but that it should have to be remembered--"

"Just so," said Willy Leroy, in his father's phrase.

Her head went up again and she looked a