“Really,” Miss Lansdale began—­or tried to.

“One moment, please!  The scholarly person goes on to relate the circumstances of the wild person’s capture—­substantially as depicted upon the canvas outside—­and winds up with:  ’After being brought to this country in chains he was reclaimed from his savage estate, was given a good English education, and can now converse intelligently upon all the leading topics of the day.  Step up, ladies and gentlemen’ he concludes, with a rather pointed delicacy, ’and you will find him ready and willing to answer all proper questions.’”

Miss Lansdale dropped her oars into the water, dully, I thought.  I released the willow that had moored us, but I persisted.

“And he always does answer all proper questions, just as the gentleman said he would.  Doubtless an improper question would be to ask him if he weren’t born tame on our own soil, of reputable New England parents; but I don’t know.  I have always conducted myself in his presence as a gentleman must, with the result that he has never failed to be chatty.  He is a trifle condescending, to be sure; he does not forget the difference in our stations, but he does not permit himself to study me with eyes of blank indifference, nor is he reticent to the verge of hostility.  Of course he feels indifferent to me,—­nothing else could be expected,—­but his captors have taught him to be gracious in public.  And, really, Miss Lansdale, you seemed strangely tame and broken to-day yourself.  You have not only received a good English education, but you answer all proper questions with a condescension hardly more marked than that of the wild person’s.  I can only pray you won’t resume a manner that will inevitably recall him to me to your own disadvantage.”

She rowed in silence against the gentle current, but she lifted her eyes to me with a look that was not all Lansdale.  There was Peavey in it.  And she smiled.  I had seen her smile before, but never before had she seen me at those times.  That she should now smile for and at me seemed to be a circumstance little short of epoch-making.

I cannot affirm that there was even one moment of that curiously short afternoon when she became wholly and frankly a Peavey.  But more than once did this felicity seem to impend, and I suspected that she might even have been more graciously endowed than with a mere Peavey capacity in general.  I believed that if she chose, she might almost become a Miss Caroline Peavey.  This occurred to me when she said:—­

“I only brought you along for your dog.”

It was, of course, quite like a Lansdale to do that; but much liker a Peavey to tell it, with that brief poise of the opened eyes upon one’s own.

“Don’t hold it against Jim,” I pleaded.  “It’s my fault.  I’m obliged to be most careful about his associates.  I’ve brought him up on a system.”

“Indeed?  It would be interesting to know why you object—­” she bridled with a challenge almost Miss Caroline in its flippancy.