She studied, though abstractedly, the settling look of antipathy on his face. She did not know what it meant, but instinctively she shuddered at it just a little.

"Les, dear, you must let me be...."

His curiosity was aroused, and he broke with a heavy bluntness into the groping silence. "What?"

"Why, I was just going to say you must let me be"—the inevitable could not be restrained—"be like a sister to you...." And she smiled, even through her troubled abstraction. She laid a hand on his arm. "I know that sounds as though it came out of a book, but it expresses my thought as well as I know how. You know—you see I'm a little older than you—though I never think of that...."

Leslie dropped his arm, and her hand slid off. It fell to her side in a limp way. She hardly noticed the fact, though. Her mind was swimming with the strange contending forces which seemed, so inexplicably, to compose her life. She seemed all at once not to see anything very clearly....

They entered the boathouse, but Leslie had not replied to the generous suggestion, and went with a moody briskness about the task of making the small craft ready for the nine-mile voyage. Then he helped her in; arranged a cushion or two. When he touched her there was a mitigated flash of the old[Pg 45] thrill. But the thrill seemed subtly palpitating, now, with something else. It was a new and, oddly enough, a not altogether disagreeable sensation. For the first time, though Leslie didn't as yet clearly realize this, he was looking at Miss Needham critically. He had certainly never looked at her this way before. He noticed a tiny dash of powder she hadn't brushed off the collar of her jacket; observed a very faint and unobtrusive hint of the Roman in her nose. As for her nose, he merely wondered, as he coaxed the engine into activity, that he hadn't marked the true line of the bridge before....

[Pg 45]

It took nearly an hour to reach Beulah, at the other end of Crystal Lake. Louise, it fortunately developed, would make her train easily. Leslie moored the launch, which had behaved surprisingly well, and escorted his passenger through the tiny village to the railroad station. Little talk sped between them. He asked at what hour the expected steamer was due. Eight o'clock, she told him. He remarked that there would be a good bit of time to consume after she arrived in Frankfort, and she replied, in a mildly distracted way, that she didn't mind. But she added, all the same, 

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