" said I, "what is your opinion of Miss Thorn?"

He stopped kicking his feet against the pile and looked up.

"Miss Thorn?"

"Yes, Miss Thorn," I repeated with emphasis. I knew he had in mind that
abominable twaddle about the canoe excursions.

"Why, to tell the truth," said he, "I never had any opinion of Miss
Thorn."

"You mean you never formed any, I suppose," I returned with some
tartness.

"Yes, that is it. How darned precise you are getting, Crocker! One
would think you were going to write a rhetoric. What put Miss Thorn into
your head?"

"I have been coaching beside her this afternoon."

"Oh!" said Farrar.

"Do you remember the night she came," I asked, "and we sat with her on
the Florentine porch, and Charles Wrexell recognized her and came up?"

"Yes," he replied with awakened interest, "and I meant to ask you about
that."

"Miss Thorn had met him in the East. And I gathered from what she told
me that he has followed her out here."

"Shouldn't wonder," said Farrar. "Don't much blame him, do you? Is that
what troubles you?" he asked, in surprise.

"Not precisely," I answered vaguely; "but from what she has said then and
since, she made it pretty clear that she hadn't any use for him; saw
through him, you know."

"Pity her if she didn't. But what did she say?"

I repeated the conversations I had had with Miss Thorn, without revealing
Mr. Allen's identity with the celebrated author.

"That is rather severe," he assented.

"He decamped for Mohair, as you know, and since that time she has gone
back on every word of it. She is with him morning and evening, and, to
crown all, stood up for him through thick and thin to-day, and praised
him. What do you think of that?"

"What I should have expected in a woman," said he, nonchalantly.

"They aren't all alike," I retorted.

He shook out his pipe, and getting down from his high seat laid his hand
on my knee.

"I thought so once, old fellow," he whispered, and went off down the
dock.

This was the nearest Farrar ever came to a confidence.

I have now to chronicle a curious friendship which had its beginning at
this time. The friendships of the other sex are quickly made, and
sometimes as quickly dissolved. This one interested me more than I care
to own. The next morning Judge Short, looking somewhat dejected after
the overnight conference he had had with his wife, was innocently and
somewhat ostentatiously engaged in tossing quoits with me in