over her shoulder.

"Oh, yes."

"It would be awful to break down half way over and miss the train."

"It won't, Louise. You won't miss your train." He spoke a little bitterly.

As a matter of fact, Leslie had been up half the night tinkering with his engine—which accounted for his fine assurance. Louise was painfully aware that the engine couldn't be consistently banked on. It didn't, as a general thing, receive the most scrupulous sort of care. The Leslian poise had its lapses.

They crept with admirable stealthiness into the kitchen, whose habitual odour of spices and damp cereal products was now broken by the livelier aroma of steaming coffee. There was only one chair in the kitchen. When Eliza the cook received her young man, who was the porter of a resort hotel[Pg 30] in Beulah, it was invariably in what the Rev. Needham liked to call God's Great Out-of-Doors—that most capacious and in many respects best furnished of receiving parlours, after all. Invariably—that is, of course, except when it rained. When it rained Eliza and her young man had an entrancing way of conceiving the single chair sufficient.

[Pg 30]

Louise signified with a wave of the hand that Leslie was to go into the dining room, ever so quietly, and fetch another chair. He did so, and set both chairs beside the kitchen table, at the places marked out already with plates, cups, and imitation silver. Then he sat down, thrust his elbows on the oilcloth, and gazed ruefully between his fists at the young lady who, still in the guise of cook, was fluttering about in the manner of young ladies who do not perhaps feel quite at home in their work, yet who would defy you to point out one single item not accomplished according to the very best methods. He watched her with a mournful intensity, which, had it possessed a little less positive feeling, would surely be called a fixed stare. She turned round presently and discovered his attitude.

"For goodness' sake," she whispered, "what makes you look at me that way?"

He shifted his gaze to the still trees outside and began humming.

"I didn't know I was looking at you any special way. And anyhow, if I was, you know why," he told her, with a slight effect of baffled yet defiant[Pg 31] contradiction which was immediately muffled by a renewed humming.

[Pg 31]

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