ourse he feels indifferent to me,--nothing else could be
expected,--but his captors have taught him to be gracious in public.
And, really, Miss Lansdale, you seemed strangely tame and broken to-day
yourself. You have not only received a good English education, but you
answer all proper questions with a condescension hardly more marked than
that of the wild person's. I can only pray you won't resume a manner
that will inevitably recall him to me to your own disadvantage."

She rowed in silence against the gentle current, but she lifted her eyes
to me with a look that was not all Lansdale. There was Peavey in it. And
she smiled. I had seen her smile before, but never before had she seen
me at those times. That she should now smile for and at me seemed to be
a circumstance little short of epoch-making.

I cannot affirm that there was even one moment of that curiously short
afternoon when she became wholly and frankly a Peavey. But more than
once did this felicity seem to impend, and I suspected that she might
even have been more graciously endowed than with a mere Peavey capacity
in general. I believed that if she chose, she might almost become a Miss
Caroline Peavey. This occurred to me when she said:--

"I only brought you along for your dog."

It was, of course, quite like a Lansdale to do that; but much liker a
Peavey to tell it, with that brief poise of the opened eyes upon one's
own.

"Don't hold it against Jim," I pleaded. "It's my fault. I'm obliged to
be most careful about his associates. I've brought him up on a system."

"Indeed? It would be interesting to know why you object--" she bridled
with a challenge almost Miss Caroline in its flippancy.

"Well, for one thing, I have to make sure that he doesn't become
worldly. Lots of good dogs are spoiled that way. And I've succeeded very
well, thus far. To this moment he believes everything is true that ought
to be true; or, if not, that something 'just as good' is true, as the
people in drug stores tell one."

"And you are afraid of me--that I'll--"

"One can't be too careful about dogs, especially one that believes as
much as that one does. Frankly, I _am_ afraid of you. You have such a
knowing way of fighting off moments that might become Peavey."

"I don't quite understand--"

"Of course you don't, but that's of little consequence--to Jim. He
doesn't understand either. But you see he has a fine faith now that the
world is all Peavey--he learned it from