Peter groped blindly.  “I shall make you,” he said again, for lack of anything better.

“Perhaps,” said Leonore, helping him out, though with a most insulting laugh in her voice and face, “you will get a string and lead me?”

Peter looked the picture of helplessness.

“Or you might run over to the Goelets’, and borrow their baby’s perambulator,” continued that segment of the Spanish Inquisition.  If ever an irritating, aggravating, crazing, exasperating, provoking fretting enraging, “I dare you,” was uttered, it was in Leonore’s manner as she said this.

Peter looked about hopelessly.

“Please hurry up and say how,” Leonore continued, “for I want to get down to the cliff walk.  It’s very wet here on the grass.  Perhaps you will carry me back?  You evidently think me a baby in arms.”  “He’s such fun to tease,” was her thought, “and you can say just what you please without being afraid of his doing anything ungentlemanly.”  Many a woman dares to torture a man for just the same reason.

She was quite right as to Peter.  He had recognized that he was powerless; that he could not use force.  He looked the picture of utter indecision.  But as Leonore spoke, a sudden change came over his face and figure.  “Leonore had said it was wet on the grass!  Leonore would wet her feet I Leonore would take cold!  Leonore would have pneumonia!  Leonore would die!” It was a shameful chain of argument for a light of the bar, logic unworthy of a school-boy.  But it was fearfully real to Peter for the moment, and he said to himself:  “I must do it, even if she never forgives me.”  Then the indecision left his face, and he took a step forward.

Leonore caught her breath with a gasp.  The “dare-you” look, suddenly changed to a very frightened one, and turning, she sped across the lawn, at her utmost speed.  She had read something in Peter’s face, and felt that she must fly, however ignominious such retreat might be.

Peter followed, but though he could have caught her in ten seconds, he did not.  As on a former occasion, he thought:  “I’ll let her get out of breath.  Then she will not be so angry.  At least she won’t be able to talk.  How gracefully she runs!”

Presently, as soon as Leonore became convinced that Peter did not intend to catch her, she slowed down to a walk.  Peter at once joined her.

“Now,” he said, “will you come back?”

Leonore was trying to conceal her panting.  She was not going to acknowledge that she was out of breath since Peter wasn’t.  So she made no reply.

“You are walking in the wrong direction,” said Peter, laying his hand on her arm.  Then, since she made no reply, his hand encircled the arm, and he stopped.  Leonore took two more steps.  Then she too, curiously enough, halted.

“Stop holding me,” she said, not entirely without betraying her breathlessness.

“You are to come back,” said Peter.