t."

"Try it? What are you talking about, Louise?"

"Why, whiskey with white-pine chips in it."

Grace rose, and moved towards the door, with the things dropping from
her lap. One of these was a spool, that rolled down the steps and out
upon the sandy road. She turned to pursue it, and recovered it at the
cost of dropping her scissors and thimble out of opposite sides of her
skirt, which she had gathered up apronwise to hold her work. When she
rose from the complicated difficulty, in which Mrs. Maynard had amiably
lent her aid, she confronted Mr. Libby, who was coming towards them from
the cliff. She gave him a stiff nod, and attempted to move away; but in
turning round and about she had spun herself into the folds of a stout
linen thread escaping from its spool. These gyves not only bound her
skirts but involved her feet in an extraordinary mesh, which tightened
at the first step and brought her to a standstill.

Mrs. Maynard began to laugh and cough, as Mr. Libby came to her friend's
help. He got the spool in his hand, and walked around her in the
endeavor to free her; but in vain. She extended him the scissors with
the stern passivity of a fate. "Cut it," she commanded, and Mr. Libby
knelt before her and obeyed. "Thanks," she said, taking back the
scissors; and now she sat down again, and began deliberately to put up
her work in her handkerchief.

"I 'll go out and get my things. I won't be gone half a minute, Mr.
Libby," said Mrs. Maynard, with her first breath, as she vanished
indoors.

Mr. Libby leaned against the post lately occupied by the factotum in his
talk with Mrs. Maynard, and looked down at Grace as she bent over
her work. If he wished to speak to her, and was wavering as to the
appropriate style of address for a handsome girl, who was at once a
young lady and a physician, she spared him the agony of a decision by
looking up at him suddenly.

"I hope," he faltered, "that you feel like a sail, this morning? Did
Mrs. Maynard--"

"I shall have to excuse myself," answered Grace, with a conscience
against saying she was sorry. "I am a very bad sailor."

"Well, so am I, for that matter," said Mr. Libby. "But it's smooth as a
pond, to-day."

Grace made no direct response, and he grew visibly uncomfortable under
the cold abstraction of the gaze with which she seemed to look through
him. "Mrs. Maynard tells me you came over with her from Europe."

"Oh yes!" cried the young man, the light of pleasant