strange reasoning!” Gertrude exclaimed.

“In that case you would not take me seriously.”

“I take everyone seriously,” said Gertrude. And without his help she stepped lightly into the boat.

Felix took up the oars and sent it forward. “Ah, this is what you have been thinking about? It seemed to me you had something on your mind. I wish very much,” he added, “that you would tell me some of these so-called reasons—these obligations.”

“They are not real reasons—good reasons,” said Gertrude, looking at the pink and yellow gleams in the water.

“I can understand that! Because a handsome girl has had a spark of coquetry, that is no reason.”

“If you mean me, it’s not that. I have not done that.”

“It is something that troubles you, at any rate,” said Felix.

“Not so much as it used to,” Gertrude rejoined.

He looked at her, smiling always. “That is not saying much, eh?” But she only rested her eyes, very gravely, on the lighted water. She seemed to him to be trying to hide the signs of the trouble of which she had just told him. Felix felt, at all times, much the same impulse to dissipate visible melancholy that a good housewife feels to brush away dust. There was something he wished to brush away now; suddenly he stopped rowing and poised his oars. “Why should Mr. Brand have addressed himself to you, and not to your sister?” he asked. “I am sure she would listen to him.”

Gertrude, in her family, was thought capable of a good deal of levity; but her levity had never gone so far as this. It moved her greatly, however, to hear Felix say that he was sure of something; so that, raising her eyes toward him, she tried intently, for some moments, to conjure up this wonderful image of a love-affair between her own sister and her own suitor. We know that Gertrude had an imaginative mind; so that it is not impossible that this effort should have been partially successful. But she only murmured, “Ah, Felix! ah, Felix!”

“Why shouldn’t they marry? Try and make them marry!” cried Felix.

“Try and make them?”

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