“I don’t play for services; they’re afraid to let me for fear I’d run comic-opera tunes into the Te Deum!”

“How shocking!”

“Do you know, Mr. Glenarm,”—her tone became confidential and her pace slackened,—“we call you the squire, at St. Agatha’s, and the lord of the manor, and names like that! All the girls are perfectly crazy about you. They’d be wild if they thought I talked with you, clandestinely,—is that the way you pronounce it?”

“Anything you say and any way you say it satisfies me,” I replied.

“That’s ever so nice of you,” she said, mockingly again.

I felt foolish and guilty. She would probably get roundly scolded if the grave Sisters learned of her talks with me, and very likely I should win their hearty contempt. But I did not turn back.

“I hope the reason you’re leaving isn’t—” I hesitated.

“Ill conduct? Oh, yes; I’m Terribly wicked, Squire Glenarm! They’re sending me off.”

“But I suppose they’re awfully strict, the Sisters.”

“They’re hideous, perfectly hideous.”

“Where is your home?” I demanded. “Chicago, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, perhaps?”

“Humph, you are dull! You ought to know from my accent that I’m not from Chicago. And I hope I haven’t a Kentucky girl’s air of waiting to be flattered to death. And no Indianapolis girl would talk to a strange man at the edge of a deep wood in the gray twilight of a winter day,—that’s from a book; and the Cincinnati girl is without my élan, esprit,—whatever you please to call it. She has more Teutonic repose,—more of Gretchen-of-the-Rhine-Valley about her. Don’t you adore French, Squire Glenarm?” she concluded breathlessly, and with no pause in her quick step.

“I adore yours, Miss Armstrong,” I asserted, yielding myself further to the joy of idiocy, and delighting in the mockery and changing moods of her talk. I did not make her out; indeed, I preferred not to! I was not then,—and I am not now, thank God,—of an analytical turn of mind. And as I grow older I prefer, even after many a blow, to take my fellow human beings a good deal as I find them. And as for women, old or young, I envy no man his gift of resolving them into elements. As well carry a spray of arbutus to the laboratory or subject the enchantment of moonlight upon running water to the flame and blow-pipe as try to analyze the heart of a girl,—particularly a girl who paddles a canoe with a sure stroke and puts up a good race with a rabbit.

A lamp shone ahead of us at the entrance of one of the houses, and lights appeared in all the buildings.

“If I knew your window I should certainly sing under it,—except that you’re going home! You didn’t tell me why they were deporting you.”