“Oh, I don’t mind that,” he said, trying to speak coolly, “if the delay won’t incommode you.”

“No,” she said.  “We shall be back before dark, and that will be time enough.  I shouldn’t like to have to walk home after dark.”

Eager words rose to the ferryman’s lips, but he wisely suppressed them, bending to his oars till the little boat sprang through the water.

The sun dropped into the river, allowing the faintly-traced sickle of the new moon to show, as the boat once more touched land,—­at the right place this time.

Rosamond tripped up the bank, with a friendly “Good-evening,” and at the top she met the professor.  “Oh, how nice of you to come and meet me!” she cried, slipping her hand through his arm.  “It grows dark so quickly after the sun goes down that I was beginning to be just a little scared.”

“I would have been here an hour ago,” he said, “but the president kept me.  I called at Miss Eldridge’s, thinking to find you returned, and then, when she said you were still absent, I hurried down here, feeling unaccountably disquieted.  It was absurd, of course.  But were you not detained longer than you anticipated?”

“No, it wasn’t absurd,” she said, clasping her other hand over his arm and giving it a little squeeze.  The spring dusk had fallen around them like a veil by this time, and they were still a little way from any much-travelled street.

“It wasn’t absurd at all,” she repeated “there’s nobody but you to care whether I come in or go out, and I like you to be worried,—­just a little, I mean,—­not enough to make you, really wretched.  I’ve had the funniest time!  The old man wasn’t there, and I was turning back, quite disappointed, when a young man,—­quite young, and very nice looking,—­who was singing in a foolish sort of way in a pretty little boat tied to a stake, said he was there in the old boatman’s place, and asked me to go with him; and I went.  At first I was puzzled, for he looked like a gentleman in most respects, and I didn’t think he could be the son of the old man you told me about; but the longer I was with him the more I saw that there was something queer about him.  He was very kind and polite, but had a sort of abrupt, startled manner, as if he were afraid of something, and I came to the conclusion that he must be a harmless insane person, and that they let him have the ferry because there isn’t anything else much that he could do.  He had a most lovely little boat, all cushioned at one end, and he rowed beautifully.”

“But it was not safe,” said the professor, in alarm.  “If a man be ever so slightly insane, there is no telling what form his insanity will take:  he might have imagined you to be inimical to him, and have thrown you overboard.”  And Rosamond felt a nervous tremor through the arm upon which she leaned.  She laughed heartily.