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 recollection kindling in his gay eyes. “We had a good time. Maynard was along: he's a first-rate fellow. I wish he were here.”
“Yes,” said Grace, “I wish so, too.” She did not know what to make of this frankness of the young man's, and she did not know whether to consider him very depraved or very innocent. In her question she continued to stare at him, without being aware of the embarrassment to which she was putting him.
“I heard of Mrs. Maynard's being here, and I thought I should find him, too. I came over yesterday to get him to go into the woods with us.”
Grace decided that this was mere effrontery. “It is a pity that he is not here,” she said; and though it ought to have been possible for her to go on and rebuke the young fellow for bestowing upon Mrs. Maynard the comradeship intended for her husband, it was not so. She could only look severely at him, and trust that he might conceive the intention which she could not express. She rebelled against the convention and against her own weakness, which would not let her boldly interfere in what she believed a wrong; she had defied society, in the mass, but here, with this man, whom as an atom of the mass she would have despised, she was powerless.
“Have you ever seen him?” Libby asked, perhaps clinging to Maynard because he was a topic of conversation in default of which there might be nothing to say.
“No,” answered Grace.
“He 's funny. He's got lots of that Western humor, and he tells a story better than any man I ever saw. There was one story of his”—
“I have no sense of humor,” interrupted Grace impatiently. “Mr. Libby,” she broke out, “I 'm sorry that you've asked Mrs. Maynard to take a sail with you. The sea air”—she reddened with the shame of not being able to proceed without this wretched subterfuge—“won't do her any good.”
“Then,” said the young man, “you must n't let her go.”
“I don't choose to forbid her,” Grace began.
“I beg your pardon,” he broke in. “I'll be back in a moment.”
He turned, and ran to the edge of the cliff, over which he vanished, and he did not reappear till Mrs. Maynard had rejoined Grace on the piazza.
“I hope you won't mind its being a little rough, Mrs. Maynard,” he said, breathing quickly. “Adams thinks we're going to have it pretty fresh before we get back.”
“Indeed, I don't want to go, then!” cried Mrs. Maynard, in petulant disappointment, letting her wraps fall upon a chair.
Mr. Libby looked at Grace, who haughtily rejected a part in the conspiracy. “I wish you to go, Louise,” she declared indignantly. “I will take the risk of all the harm that comes to you from the bad weather.” She picked up the shawls, and handed them to Mr. Libby, on whom her eyes blazed their contempt and wonder. It cost a great deal of persuasion and insistence now to make Mrs. Maynard go, and he left all this to Grace, not uttering a word till he gave Mrs. Maynard his hand to help her down the steps. Then he said, “Well, I wonder what Miss Breen does want.”
“I 'm sure I don't know,” said the other. “At first she did n't want me to go, this morning, and now she makes me. I do hope it is n't going to be a storm.”
“I don't believe it is. A little fresh, perhaps. I thought you might be seasick.”
“Don't you remember? I'm never seasick! That's one of the worst signs.”
“Oh, yes.”
“If I could be thoroughly seasick once, it would be the best thing I could do.”
“Is she capricious?” asked Mr. Libby.
“Grace?” cried Mrs. Maynard, releasing her hand half-way down the steps, in order to enjoy her astonishment without limitation of any sort. “Grace capricious!”
“Yes,” said Mr. Libby, “that's what I thought. Better take my hand again,” and he secured that of Mrs. Maynard, who continued her descent. “I suppose I don't understand her exactly. Perhaps she did n't like my not calling her Doctor. I did n't call her anything. I suppose she thought I was dodging it. I was. I should have had to call her Miss Breen, if I called her anything.”
“She wouldn't have cared. She is n't a doctor for the name of it.”
“I suppose you think it's a pity?” he asked.
“What?”
“Her being a doctor.”
“I'll tell her you say so.”
“No, don't. But don't you?”
“Well, I would n't want to be one,” said Mrs. Mayward candidly.
“I suppose it's all right, if she does it from a sense of duty, as you say,” he suggested.
“Oh, yes, she's all right. And she's just as much of a girl as anybody; though she don't know it,” Mrs. Maynard added astutely. “Why would n't she come with us? Were you afraid to ask her?”
“She said she was n't a good sailor. Perhaps she thought we were too young. She must be older than you.”
“Yes, and you, too!” cried Mrs. Maynard, with good-natured derision.
“She doesn't look old,” returned Mr. Libby.
“She's twenty-eight. How old are you?”
“I promised the census-taker not to tell till his report came out.”
“What
