uthful unless you stay just where you are--please!"

"Well!" said Dosia, with laughing pleasure.

"Besides, I've been wanting to consult you about the Alexanders," he
went on, leaning across the table toward her, intimately. "It's so
beautiful to see them together, that to feel that they're in trouble
distresses me beyond words. You're so near to them both, I thought that
perhaps"--His face clouded partly. "Do you know anything about the real
state of Mr. Alexander's affairs?"

Dosia shook her head. "No; only that he is very much worried over them."

"He wanted to sell the island; he sent me off on that business lately.
He'll sell it sometime, of course, but I don't know how complicating the
delay is. He's the kind of man you can't ask; you have to wait until he
tells you. You can't _make_ a person have confidence in you. Won't you
please have some of these strawberries with me? Do!"

"No; you must eat them _all_," said Dosia, with charming authority, her
arms before her on the table, elbow-sleeved, white and dimpled, as she
regarded him. He seemed to take up all the corner, against the
background of the green honeysuckle in the fresh morning light. With
that smile upon his face, he seemed extraordinarily masculine and
absorbing, yet appealing, too.

Dosia felt carried out of herself by a sudden heady resolution--or,
rather, not a new resolution, but one that she had had in mind for a
long, long time, before, oh, before she had even known who this man
was. She had planned over and over again how she was to say those words,
and now the time had come. She could not sit here with him in this new,
sweet friendliness without saying them. She had imagined the scene in so
many different ways! When she had gone over it by herself, her cheeks
had flushed, her eyes had shone with the tears in them. The words as she
spoke them had gone deeply, convincingly, from heart to heart--or
perhaps, in an assumed, tremulous lightness, the meaning in her impulse
had shown all the clearer to one who understood. For a year and a half
the uttered thought had been the climax to which her dreams had led; it
would have seemed a monstrous, impossible thing that it had not been
reached before.

She began now, in a moment's pause, only to find, too late, that all
warmth and naturalness had left her with the effort. Fluent
dream-practice is only too apt to make one uncomfortably crude and
conscious in real life.

"I want to thank you for bein