Standing and surveying the silent scene of former gayety, a figure came down the slope, crushing the grass with lingering tread, checked himself, and, half-reversed, surveyed it with her.  Her first impulse was to approach, her next to retreat; by a resolution of forces she remained where she was.  Mr. Raleigh’s position prevented her from seeing the expression of his face; from his attitude seldom was anything to be divined.  He turned with a motion of the arm, as if he swung off a burden, and met her eye.  He laughed, and drew near.

“I am tempted to return to that suspicion of mine when I first met you, Miss Marguerite,” said he.  “You take shape from solitude and empty air as easily as a Dryad steps from her tree.”

“There are no Dryads now,” said Marguerite, sententiously.

“Then you confess to being a myth?”

“I confess to being tired, Mr. Raleigh.”

Mr. Raleigh’s manner changed, at her petulance and fatigue, to the old air of protection, and he gave her his hand.  It was pleasant to be the object of his care, to be with him as at first, to renew their former relation.  She acquiesced, and walked beside him.

“You have had some weary travel,” he said, “and probably not more than half of it in the path.”

And she feared he would glance at the rents in her frock, forgetting that they were not sufficiently infrequent facts to be noticeable.

“He treats me like a child,” she thought.  “He expects me to tear my dress!  He forgets, that, while thirteen years were making a statue of her, they were making a woman of me!” And she snatched away her hand.

“I have the boat below,” he said, without paying attention to the movement.  “You took the longest way round, which, you have heard, is the shortest way home.  You have never been on the lake with me.”  And he was about to assist her in.

She stepped back, hesitating.

“No, no,” he said.  “It is very well to think of walking back, but it must end in thinking.  You have no impetus now to send you over another half-dozen miles of wood-faring, no pique to sting, Io.”

And before she could remonstrate, she was lifted in, the oars had flashed twice, and there was deep water between herself and shore.  She was in reality too much fatigued to be vexed, and she sat silently watching the spaces through which they glanced, and listening to the rhythmic dip of the oars.  The soft afternoon air, with its melancholy sweetness and tinge of softer hue, hung round them; the water, brown and warm, was dimpled with the flight of myriad insects; they wound among the islands, a path one of them knew of old.  From the shelving rocks a wild convolvulus drooped its twisted bells across them, a sweet-brier snatched at her hair in passing, a sudden elder-tree shot out its creamy panicles above, they ripped up drowsy beds of folded lily-blooms.