of dismay.

"Why, this isn't where we ought to have landed!" she exclaimed. "It's a
place a mile farther down the river."

He looked very much confused.

"I have made some stupid blunder," he stammered. "I owe you a thousand
apologies, but I was singing, and I suppose I passed the landing without
noticing it. I will not keep you long, though. I can row back in ten
minutes."

"I oughtn't to have asked you to sing when you were rowing," she said
remorsefully. "I'm so sorry you should have all that extra work."

"Oh, I don't mind that," he said, trying to speak coolly, "if the delay
won't incommode you."

"No," she said. "We shall be back before dark, and that will be time
enough. I _shouldn't_ like to have to walk home after dark."

Eager words rose to the ferryman's lips, but he wisely suppressed them,
bending to his oars till the little boat sprang through the water.

The sun dropped into the river, allowing the faintly-traced sickle of
the new moon to show, as the boat once more touched land,--at the right
place this time.

Rosamond tripped up the bank, with a friendly "Good-evening," and at the
top she met the professor. "Oh, how nice of you to come and meet me!"
she cried, slipping her hand through his arm. "It grows dark so quickly
after the sun goes down that I was beginning to be just a little
scared."

"I would have been here an hour ago," he said, "but the president kept
me. I called at Miss Eldridge's, thinking to find you returned, and
then, when she said you were still absent, I hurried down here, feeling
unaccountably disquieted. It was absurd, of course. But were you not
detained longer than you anticipated?"

"No, it wasn't absurd," she said, clasping her other hand over his arm
and giving it a little squeeze. The spring dusk had fallen around them
like a veil by this time, and they were still a little way from any
much-travelled street.

"It wasn't absurd _at all_," she repeated "there's nobody but you to
care whether I come in or go out, and I like you to be worried,--just a
little, I mean,--not enough to make you, really wretched. I've had the
funniest time! The old man wasn't there, and I was turning back, quite
disappointed, when a young man,--quite young, and very nice
looking,--who was singing in a foolish sort of way in a pretty little
boat tied to a stake, said he was there in the old boatman's place, and
asked me to go with him; and I went. At first I was puzzled, for he
looked l