om it,
but resolutely floated, as one may at such times, on the surface. They
laughed together and jested; they talked in the gay idleness of such
rare moods.

They passed a yacht at anchor, and a young fellow in a white duck cap,
leaning over the rail, saluted Libby with the significant gravity which
one young man uses towards another whom he sees in a sail-boat with a
pretty girl.

She laughed at this. "Do you know your friend?" she asked.

"Yes. This time I do?"

"He fancies you are taking some young lady a sail. What would he say if
you were to stop and introduce me to him as Dr. Breen?"

"Oh, he knows who you are. It's Johnson."

"The one whose clothes you came over in, that morning?"

"Yes. I suppose you laughed at me."

"I liked your having the courage to do it. But how does he know me?"

"I--I described you. He's rather an old friend." This also amused her.
"I should like to hear how you described me."

"I will tell you sometime. It was an elaborate description. I could n't
get through with it now before we landed."

The old town had come out of the haze of the distance,--a straggling
village of weather-beaten wood and weather-beaten white paint,
picturesque, but no longer a vision of gray stone and pale marble. A
coal-yard, and a brick locomotive house, and rambling railroad sheds
stretched along the water-front. They found their way easily enough
through the sparse shipping to the steps at the end of the wooden pier,
where Libby dropped the sail and made his boat fast.

A little pleasant giddiness, as if the lightness of her heart had
mounted to her head, made her glad of his arm up these steps and up the
wharf; and she kept it as they climbed the sloping elm-shaded village
street to the main thoroughfare, with its brick sidewalks, its shops and
awnings, and its cheerful stir and traffic.

The telegraph office fronted the head of the street which they had
ascended. "You can sit here in the apothecary's till I come down," he
said.

"Do you think that will be professionally appropriate? I am only a nurse
now."

"No, I wasn't thinking of that. But I saw a chair in there. And we can
make a pretense of wanting some soda. It is the proper thing to treat
young ladies to soda when one brings them in from the country."

"It does have that appearance," she assented, with a smile. She kept
him waiting with what would have looked like coquettish hesitation in
another, while she glanced at the windows