“But I would turn mine for you,” said Archie.

“You couldn’t.  Lives grow together.  They join beforehand, if they join at all.  You like me, perhaps,—­just what you see of me; but you do not know me, nor I you.  If it—­this—­were meant, we should.”

“Should what?”

“Know.  Be sure.”

“I am sure of what I told you.”

“And I thank you very much; but I do not—­I never could—­belong to you.”

What made Rosamond so wise about knowing and belonging?

She could not tell, herself; she had never thought it out before; but she seemed to see it very clearly now.  She did not belong to Archie Mucklegrand, nor he to her; he was mistaken; their lives had no join; to make them join would be a force, a wrenching.

Archie Mucklegrand did not care to have it put on such deep ground.  He liked Rosamond; he wanted her to like him; then they should be married, of coarse, and go to Scotland, and have a good time; but this quiet philosophy cooled him somewhat.  As they walked up the bank together, he wondered at himself a little that he did not feel worse about it.  If she had been coquettish, or perverse, she might have been all the more bewitching to him.  If he had thought she liked somebody else better, he might have been furiously jealous; but “her way of liking a fellow would be a slow kind of a way, after all.”  That was the gist of his thought about it; and I believe that to many very young men, at the age of waxed moustaches and German dancing, that “slow kind of a way” in a girl is the best possible insurance against any lasting damage that their own enthusiasm might suffer.

He had not been contemptible in the offering of his love; his best had come out at that moment; if it does not come out then, somehow,—­through face and tone, in some plain earnestness or simple nobleness, if not in fashion of the spoken word as very well it may not,—­it must be small best that the man has in him.

Rosamond’s simple saying of the truth, as it looked to her in that moment of sure insight, was the best help she could have given him.  Truth is always the best help.  He did not exactly understand the wherefore, as she understood it; but the truth touched him nevertheless, in the way that he could perceive.  They did not “belong” to each other.

And riding down in the late train that evening, Archie Mucklegrand said to himself, drawing a long breath,—­“It would have been an awful tough little joke, after all, telling it to the old lady!”

“Are you too tired to walk home?” Kenneth Kincaid asked of Rosamond, helping her put the baskets in the carriage.

Dakie Thayne had asked Ruth the same question five minutes before, and they two had gone on already.  Are girls ever too tired to walk home after a picnic, when the best of the picnic is going to walk home with them?  Of course Rosamond was not too tired; and Mrs. Holabird had the carryall quite to herself and her baskets.