rolled together;
but I admit you had some provocation," she answered lightly, "at least
in our first meeting. When I demolished your new fishing-rod, I think
you might have accepted my apologies more gracefully; and I think you
need not have been so particularly uncivil when Jimmy and I tried to
come to your assistance on the pond. I have not yet recovered from the
reproof conveyed on that occasion by your manner, which plainly
indicated that, in your opinion, it would have been more tactful for
us to sail by, and ignore your disaster, or treat it as an episode
which did not call for explanation or remark. I should have felt duly
humiliated, no doubt; but I have become hardened to rebuffs, since I
have been at Nepaug, for I meet with many, as I go about like a beggar
from door to door in South East."

"Distributing tracts?" Flint asked, with eyebrows raised a little.

"No."

"Collecting statistics, perhaps?"

"Not at all; my errand is neither philanthropic nor scientific."

"Private and personal, that is, and not to be farther pursued by
impertinent inquiry?"

"Oh, I have no objection to telling you, since you are not a native. I
am searching for my great-great-grandmother."

Flint looked at his companion uneasily. She smiled.

"No, I have not lost my senses. Such as they are, I have them all. I
do not expect to find this ancestress of mine in the flesh, nor
sitting in any one of the splint rockers behind the checkered
window-panes of the old South East houses. It is only her portrait for
which I am searching as for hid treasure."

"Ah!"

"Yes, her portrait. I feel certain it is hidden away somewhere in
South East."

"How very odd!"

"Odd? Not at all, as you will say when you come to hear the story of
the original. But perhaps it would bore you to listen?"

"Go on; I am all attention."

"Well, to begin with, my great-great-grandmother was a very pretty
girl."

"I can believe it."

Winifred looked quickly round, but her companion's eyes were fixed
upon the horizon with an abstracted gaze which lent an air of
impersonality to his words. So she began again:

"Yes, she was a young Quakeress, born, I believe, in Philadelphia; but
her father and mother died, and she came to South East, to live with
her uncle, when she was about eighteen. The story of her girlhood is
rather vague; but somehow she fell in love with an English officer,
and made a runaway match which turned out better than such affairs
us