well in the water, swaying to and fro as though with
impatience to be gone. The girl sprang to her seat, discarding his
eagerly proffered assistance, and, taking both oars, laid them in their
respective rowlocks, and seemed about to start, when she paused and
asked abruptly--

"Are you a sailor?"

He smiled. "Not I! Do I remind you of one?"

"You are strong, and you manage a boat as though you were accustomed to
the work. Also you look as if you had been at sea."

"Rightly guessed!" he replied, still smiling; "I certainly _have_ been
at sea; I have been coasting all about your lovely land. My yacht went
across to Seiland this afternoon."

She regarded him more intently, and observed, with the critical eye of a
woman, the refined taste displayed in his dress, from the very cut of
his loose travelling coat, to the luxurious rug of fine fox-shins, that
lay so carelessly cast on the shore at a little distance from him. Then
she gave a gesture of hauteur and half-contempt.

"You have a yacht? Oh! then you are a gentleman. You do nothing for your
living?"

"Nothing, indeed!" and he shrugged his shoulders with a mingled air of
weariness and self-pity, "except one thing--I live!"

"Is that hard work?" she inquired wonderingly.

"Very."

They were silent then, and the girl's face grew serious as she rested on
her oars, and still surveyed him with a straight, candid gaze, that,
though earnest and penetrating, had nothing of boldness in it. It was
the look of one in whose past there were no secrets--the look of a child
who is satisfied with the present and takes no thought for the future.
Few women look so after they have entered their teens. Social artifice,
affectation, and the insatiate vanity that modern life encourages in the
feminine nature--all these things soon do away with the pellucid
clearness and steadfastness of the eye--the beautiful, true, untamed
expression, which, though so rare, is, when seen infinitely more
bewitching than all the bright arrows of coquetry and sparkling
invitation that flash from the glances of well-bred society dames, who
have taken care to educate their eyes if not their hearts. This girl was
evidently not trained properly; had she been so, she would have dropped
a curtain over those wide, bright windows of her soul; she would have
remembered that she was alone with a strange man at midnight--at
midnight, though the sun shone; she would have simpered and feigned
embarrassment, eve