t the fairest of sweet maids," I
made answer. "I will do nothing you do not wish me to do. For, hearken to
me, Helene, my heart is bound up in you, as indeed you know. But as to
the second word of accusation--that I do not love you anymore--"

"You do not--you cannot!" she interrupted, "or you would not go out with
Michael Texel all night to drinking-places, and worse, keeping your
father and those that _do_ love awake, hurting their hearts here" (she
put her hand on her side), "and all for what--that you may drink and
revel and run into danger with your true friends?"

"Sweetheart," I began--penitently.

The Little Playmate made a gesture of infinite impatience.

"Do not call me that," she said; "you have no right. I am not your
sweetheart. You have no heart at all to love any one with, or you would
not behave as you have done lately. You are naught but a silly, selfish
boy, that cares for nothing but his own applause and thinks that he has
nothing to do but to come home when his high mightiness is ready and find
us all on our knees before him, saying: 'Put your foot, great sir, on our
necks--so shall we be happy and honored.'"

Now this was so perilously near the truth that I was mightily incensed,
and I felt that I did well to be angry.

"Girl," I said, grandly, "you do not know what you say. I have been
abroad all night on the service of the State, and I have discovered a
most dangerous conspiracy at the peril of my life!"

For I thought it was as well to put the best face on the matter; and,
besides, I have never been able, all the days of me, to hide my light
under a bushel, as the clerks prate about.

But I was not yet done with my adventuring of this eventful day. And in
spite of my father setting me, like a misbehaving bairn, to the drudgery
of the water-carrying, there was more in life for me that day than merely
hauling upon a handle. For that is a thing which galls an aspiring youth
worse than any other labor, being so terribly monotonous.

As for me, I did not take kindly to it at all--not even though I could
see mine own image deep in the pails of water as they came up brimming
and cool out of the fern-grown dripping darkness of the well. Aye, and
though the image given back to me was (I say it only of that time) a
likely enough picture of a lad with short, crisped locks that curled
whenever they were wet, cheeks like apples, and skin that hath always
been a trouble to me. For I thought it unmanly