“Have you, Chuck?”

They drifted on in silence.  “Say, Tess, you ought to learn to row.  It’s good exercise.  Those girls in California and New York, they play baseball and row and swim as good as the boys.  Honest, some of ’em are wonders!”

“Oh, I’m sick of your swell New York friends!  Can’t you talk about something else?”

He saw that he had blundered without in the least understanding how or why.  “All right.  What’ll we talk about?” In itself a fatal admission.

“About—­you.”  Tessie made it a caress.

“Me?  Nothin’ to tell about me.  I just been drillin’ and studyin’ and marchin’ and readin’ some—­Oh, say, what d’you think?”

“What?”

“They been learnin’ us—­teachin’ us, I mean—­French.  It’s the darnedest language!  Bread is pain.  Can you beat that?  If you want to ask for a piece of bread, you say like this:  Donnay ma un morso doo pang.  See?”

“My!” breathed Tessie, all admiration.

And within her something was screaming:  “Oh, my God!  Oh, my God!  He knows French.  And those girls that can row and everything.  And me, I don’t know anything.  Oh, God, what’ll I do?”

It was as though she could see him slipping away from her, out of her grasp, out of her sight.  She had no fear of what might come to him in France.  Bullets and bayonets would never hurt Chuck.  He’d make it, just as he always made the 7.50 when it seemed as if he was going to miss it sure.  He’d make it there and back, all right.  But he—­he’d be a different Chuck, while she stayed the same Tessie.  Books, travel, French, girls, swell folks—­

And all the while she was smiling and dimpling and trailing her hand in the water.  “Bet you can’t guess what I got in that lunch box.”

“Chocolate cake.”

“Well, of course I’ve got chocolate cake.  I baked it myself this morning.”

“Yes, you did!”

“Why, Chuck Mory, I did so!  I guess you think I can’t do anything, the way you talk.”

“Oh, don’t I!  I guess you know what I think.”

“Well, it isn’t the cake I mean.  It’s something else.”

“Fried chicken!”

“Oh, now you’ve gone and guessed it.”  She pouted prettily.

“You asked me to, didn’t you?”

Then they laughed together, as at something exquisitely witty.

Down the river, drifting, rowing.  Tessie pointed to a house half hidden among the trees on the farther shore:  “There’s Hatton’s camp.  They say they have grand times there with their swell crowd some Saturdays and Sundays.  If I had a house like that, I’d live in it all the time, not just a couple of days out of the whole year.”  She hesitated a moment.  “I suppose it looks like a shanty to you now.”

Chuck surveyed it, patronizingly.  “No, it’s a nice little place.”

They beached their boat, and built a little fire, and had supper on the river bank, and Tessie picked out the choice bits for him—­the breast of the chicken, beautifully golden brown; the ripest tomato; the firmest, juiciest pickle; the corner of the little cake which would give him a double share of icing.  She may not have been versed in French, Tessie, but she was wise in feminine wiles.