e
breeze is freshening out on the water. You are fagged and tired and
needing a bracer. Let's go and do a turn on the lake in the _Clytie_."

From where he was sitting Griswold could see the trim little catboat,
resplendent in polished brass and mahogany, riding at its buoy beyond
the lawn landing-stage. He cared little for the water, but the
invitation pointed to a delightful prolongation of the basking process
which had come to be one of the chief luxuries of the Mereside
afternoons.

"I'm not much of a sailor," he began; but she cut him off.

"You'll do to pull and haul. Wait for me; I'll be ready in less time
than it would take another woman--_Fidelia_, for example--to make up her
mind what she wanted to wear."

He waited; and when she came down, a few minutes later, crisply boyish
in the nattiest of yachting costumes, he wondered how she could appear
in so many different characters, fitting each in succession and
contriving always to make the latest transformation, while it lasted,
the one in which she figured as the most enticingly adorable.

"Did you look in the glass before you came down?" he asked, standing up
to get the artistic effect of the shapely little figure backgrounded
against the dull reds of the house wall.

"Naturally," she laughed. "Why, please? Is my face dirty?"

He ignored the flippancy.

"If you did, I don't need to tell you how irresistibly dazzling you
are."

"Why shouldn't you, if you feel like it? Of course, I'd know you didn't
mean it. If you were describing me to somebody else, or in the book,
you'd say, 'Um, yes; rather fetching; pretty enough to--' But we all
like to be sugared a little now and then; and there's one thing you
must always remember: a woman's dressing-glass can't talk. Are you
ready? Open the window screen and drop the manuscript inside. It will be
safe until we come back, and the _Clytie_ might be tempted to throw cold
water on it if we should take it along. She's a wet little boat in a
sea."

This for the outsetting: light-hearted badinage, a fair summer
afternoon, a zephyrish breeze coming in tiny cat's-paws out of the
north-west, and a cloudless sky. At the landing-stage Griswold made
himself useful, paying out the sea-line of the movable mooring buoy and
hauling on the shore-line until the handsome little craft lay at their
feet. Strictly under orders he made sail on the little ship, and when
the captain had taken her place at the tiller he shoved off.