f you are
sure your people will not worry about you--I--I should be glad to share
my lunch with you. Then we could go home together afterward."

She did not look at me now. Instead she turned her head.

"Are--are you sure there is enough for two?" she asked, in a curiously
choked tone.

By way of answer I led the horse to the bushes, drew the lunch basket
from the shade, and threw back the cover. Dorinda's picnic lunches were
triumphs and she had never put up a more tempting one.

Miss Colton looked down into the basket.

"Oh!" she exclaimed.

"There appears to be enough, doesn't there?" I observed, drily.

"But--but I couldn't think of . . . Are you sure I won't be . . . Thank
you. Yes, I'll stay."

Before I could offer my hand to help her from the saddle she sprang to
the ground. Her eyes were sparkling.

"Mr. Paine," she said, in a burst of confidence, "it is shameless to
tell you so, I know, but I was dreadfully afraid you weren't going to
ask me. I am absolutely STARVED."

CHAPTER XII

"And now," continued Miss Colton, after an interval during which, I
presume, she had been waiting for some reply to her frank declaration
concerning mind and appetite, "what must I do to help? Shall I unpack
the basket?"

I was struggling, as we say in Denboro, to get the ship under control. I
had been taken aback so suddenly that I had lost steerage way. My slight
experience with the vagaries of the feminine mind had not prepared me
for the lightning changes of this kind. Not two minutes before she had,
if one might judge by her look and tone, been deeply offended, almost
insulted, because I refused to permit her wandering off alone into the
woods. My invitation to lunch had been given on the spur of the moment
and with no idea that it would be accepted. And she not only accepted,
but had expected me to invite her, had been fearful that I might not do
so. She told me so, herself.

"Shall I unpack the basket?" she repeated. She was looking at me
intently and the toe of her riding boot was patting the leaves. "What is
the matter? Are you sorry I am going to stay?"

It was high time for me to get under way. There were squalls on the
horizon.

"Oh, no, no!" I exclaimed, hastily. "Of course not. I am delighted. But
you need not trouble to help. Just let me attend to your horse and I
will have lunch ready in a jiffy."

I led Don over to the little green belt of meadow between the trees and
the sand of the beach