ratical intentions were instantly obvious
to the girl in the boat.

How did he dare!--after all these months ...

For an exciting second she plotted escape by flight, but the impulse was
all but still-born. He would be on her before she could put about. The
girl sat entirely still, regarding the swimmer in a kind of fascinated
silence. The irony of fate, indeed, that, at a moment when her whole
mind and heart were toward the rose-pink future, this scapegrace ghost
from her only "past" should have risen out of the sea upon her. To dream
of a Canning, and be entrapped by a Dalhousie!...

The youth sloshed alongside, laid hold of the boat's nose, and
methodically and with some difficulty pulled himself in. The weight of
his ingress tipped the gunwale to the water's edge, but Carlisle made no
outcry. She was clear of head; and the heart of her desire was to be
free of this misadventure without attracting attention from the shore.

She said in a sharp, clear voice: "Mr. Dalhousie, are you perfectly
crazy?"

Dalhousie, in his swimmer's suit, sat stiffly forward, sluicing water
into the bottom. He was a big and well-built boy, with a face that had
no viciousness; but his dark eyes, with their heavy silken lashes, were
hardly meant for a man. Neither was his mouth, for all that he sought to
set it so firmly now.

"Mr. Dalhousie," he repeated with elaborate distinctness. "When d'
I--draw that--title?"

The girl sat eyeing him with frosty calm: a look which covered rage
within, not unmingled with perturbation....

He was a neighbor of hers, this audacious youth, though not of
Washington Street; impecunious, and hence negligible; moreover somewhat
notorious of late for a too vivid behavior: the distant bowing
acquaintance of many years. This till the moment of indiscretion last
May; when, encountering his dashing attractions in the boredom of a dull
resort, far from her mother's restrictive eye, she had for an idle
fortnight allowed the relation between them to become undeniably
changed. Foolish indeed; but really she had thought--or now really
thought she had thought--that the impossible youth took it all no more
seriously than she. Not till her return home last month had he revealed
his complete untrustworthiness: presuming, as she termed it, making
claims and advances, putting her to trouble to keep her vernal unwisdom
from her mother. Still, she _had_ thought she had disposed of him
at last....

Now there sat the u