iming
at a professional behavior; that she was in fact abandoning herself to
a recovered sense of girlhood and all its sweetest irresponsibilities.
Those who would excuse so weak and capricious a character may urge, if
they like, that she was behaving as wisely as a young physician of the
other sex would have done in the circumstances.

She concluded to remain on the beach, where only the children were
playing in the sand, and where she could easily escape any other
companionship that threatened. After she had walked long enough to spend
the first passion of her reverie, she sat down under the cliff, and
presently grew conscious of his boat swinging at anchor in its wonted
place, and wondered that she had not thought he must come back for that.
Then she had a mind to tear up her letter as superfluous; but she did
not. She rose from her place under the cliff, and went to look for the
dory. She found it drawn up on the sand in a little cove. It was the
same place, and the water was so shoal for twenty feet out that no one
could have rowed the dory to land; it must be dragged up. She laughed
and blushed, and then boldly amused herself by looking for footprints;
but the tide must have washed them out long ago; there were only the
light, small footprints of the children who had been playing about the
dory. She brushed away some sand they had scattered over the seat, and
got into the boat and sat down there. It was a good seat, and commanded
a view of the sail-boat in the foreground of the otherwise empty ocean;
she took out her letter, and let it lie in the open hands which she let
lie in her lap.

She was not impatient to have the time pass; it went only too soon.
Though she indulged that luxury of terror in imagining her letter torn
up and scornfully thrown away, she really rested quite safe as to the
event; but she liked this fond delay, and the soft blue afternoon might
have lasted forever to her entire content.

A little whiff of breeze stole up, and suddenly caught the letter from
her open hands, and whisked it out over the sand. With a cry she fled
after it, and when she had recaptured it, she thought to look at her
watch. It was almost time for the barge, and now she made such needless
haste, in order not to give herself chance for misgiving or retreat,
that she arrived too soon at the point where she meant to intercept
the driver on his way to the house; for in her present mutiny she had
resolved to gratify a lit