“I have made as little effort to keep it as I did to acquire it,” I said, “but it stays on, and I’ve a notion it will stay on as long as Jim and I are uncorrupted.  But it shan’t inconvenience you,” I added brightly, in time to forestall an imminent other “Nonsense!”

Being thus neatly thwarted, she looked over my shoulder and bent to her oars, for we had again drifted toward the troubled waters of the dam.

“I warned you—­if you listened to me,” I reminded her.

“Oh, I’ve not been listening—­only thinking.”

“Of course, and you were disbelieving.  It’s high time you put us ashore.  I want to believe, and I want not to be drowned.  So does Jim,—­both of ’em.”

She pointed the boat to our landing, and as she leaned her narrow shoulders far back she shot me; one swift look.  But I could see much farther into the water that floated us.

CHAPTER XXV

THE CASE OF FATTY BUDLOW

Lest Miss Katharine Lansdale seem unduly formidable, I should, perhaps, say that I appeared to be alone in finding her so.  Little Arcadians of my own sex younger than myself—­and, if I may suggest it, less discerning—­were not only not menaced, but she invited them with a cordiality in which the keenest eye among them could detect no flaw.  Miss Lansdale’s mother had also pleased the masculine element of the town at her first progress through its pleasant streets.  But Miss Caroline, despite many details of dress and manner that failed interestingly to corroborate the fact, was an old woman, and one whose way of life made her difficult of comprehension to the Little Country.  Socially and industrially, one might say, she did not fit the scheme of things as the town had been taught to conceive it.  Whereas, her daughter was a person readily to be understood in all parts of the world where men have eyes—­as well by the homekeeping as by the travelled.  Eustace Eubanks, more or less a man of the world by virtue of that adventurous trip to the Holy Land, understood her at one glance, as did Arthur Updyke, who had fared abroad to the college of pharmacy and knew things.  But she was also lucid as crystal to G. Brown and Creston Fancett, whose knowledge of the outside world was somewhat affected by their experience of it, which was nothing.  To all seven of the ages was this woman comprehensible.  Old Bolivar Kent, eighty-six and shuffling his short steps to the grave not far ahead, understood her with one look; the but adolescent Guy McCormick, hovering tragically on the verge of his first public shave, divined her quite as capably; the middle-yeared Westley Keyts read her so unerringly on a day when she first regaled his vision that he toiled for half an hour as one entranced, disengaging what he believed to be porter-house steaks long after the porter-house line in the beef under his hand had been passed.