There was no answering this; but, as the bonnet now veered towards the
sunny south, and the boat rounding the sharp corner of the bay
abruptly turned in the same direction, the young man was surprised to
find himself looking his companion fully in the face, caught in the
sudden sunshine of her smile.

"I was about to remark," he said, emboldened by this token of favour,
"that there is nothing I delight in so much as listening to the voice
of nature--that is human nature."

The smile deepened into a rippling laugh. "I am in one of my inhuman
moods this morning," she said, "but I believe my forte is action
rather than speech. Let me take your place, and those oars, please."

He resigned them both, and at once; not because the unusual exertion
had made any appreciable inroad upon his strength, but because he
foresaw new phases of picturesqueness in the young girl's dainty
handling of the oars. Nor was he disappointed. The skirt of her dress
was narrow and long, beginning, like an infant's robe, a few inches
below the arms, and thence descending in softly curving lines to her
feet, with as little hint of rigidity or compression about the
tenderly rounded waist as about the full fair throat above it. She
stretched out a pair of shoes, incredibly small and unmistakably
French, and bent her slender gauntleted hands blithely to their task.
The newborn sweetness of the spring morning was about them. On the
heavily wooded shore the great evergreens towered darkly against the
sun, but its beams fell with dazzling brightness upon the meadowy
undulations of the lake. Above them they heard at times the wild cry
of the soaring gull, or the apparently disembodied voice of some