“You don’t deserve to have a collie sheep-dog friend,” he protested reproachfully.  “How was I to know that you were going away?”

Another time Elinor might have felt that she owed him an explanation, but just now she was careful, and troubled about the packing.

“How was I to know you didn’t know?” she retorted.  “It was in the Transcript.”

“Well!” said Ormsby.  “Things have come to a pretty pass when I have to keep track of you through the society column.  I didn’t see the paper.  Dyckman brought me word last night at Vineyard Haven, and we broke a propeller blade on the Amphitrite trying to get here in time.”

“I am so sorry—­for the Amphitrite,” she said.  “But you are here, and in good season.  Shall I call mother and Nell?”

“No.  I ran out to see if I’m in time to do your errands for you—­take your tickets, and so on.”

“Oh, we shouldn’t think of troubling you.  James can do all those things.  And failing James, there is a very dependable young woman at the head of this household.  Haven’t I ‘personally conducted’ the family all over Europe?”

“James is a base hireling,” said the caller, blandly.  “And as for the capable young woman:  do I or do I not recollect a dark night on the German frontier when she was glad enough to call on a sleepy fellow pilgrim to help her wrestle with a particularly thick-headed customs officer?”

“If you do, it is not especially kind of you to remind her of it.”

He looked up quickly, and the masterful soul of the man, for which the clean-cut, square-set jaw and the athletic figure were the outward presentments, put on a mask of deference and humility.

“You are hard with me, Elinor—­always flinty and adamantine, and that sort.  Have you no soft side at all?”

She laughed.

“The sentimental young woman went out some time ago, didn’t she?  One can’t be an anachronism.”

“I suppose not.  Yet I’m always trying to make myself believe other things about you.  Don’t you like to be cared for like other women?”

“I don’t know; sometimes I think I should.  But I have had to be the man of the house since father died.”

“I know,” he said.  “And it is the petty anxieties that have made you put the woman to the wall.  I’m here this morning to save you some of them; to take the man’s part in your outsetting, or as much of it as I can.  When are you going to give me the right to come between you and all the little worries, Elinor?”

She turned from him with a faint gesture of cold impatience.

“You are forgetting your promise,” she said quite dispassionately.  “We were to be friends; as good friends as we were before that evening at Bar Harbor.  I told you it would be impossible, and you said you were strong enough to make it possible.”

He looked at her with narrowing eyes.

“It is possible, in a way.  But I’d like to know what door of your heart it is that I haven’t been able to open.”