Burns also turned, met his companion’s eye, and broke into a laugh.  “I shall have to admit you have,” said he.

“Why should you have doubted it?”

“I haven’t been gone long enough for you to have read and digested it.”

Leaver looked at his watch.  “You were gone seventeen minutes.  That’s long enough to take in the argument pretty thoroughly.  As to digesting it—­it’s indigestible.  Why try?”

“No use at all.  But having given my mental machinery a lot of friction I enjoyed trying to stir yours up also to irritation and discontent.  But I haven’t done it.  You’ve remained calm where I grew hot.  Also you’ve proved your ability to change the subject of your thinking as you would switch off one electric current and switch on another.  It shows you’re a well man.”

“I must warn you, as I have done at various times in our association:  ‘Don’t jump to conclusions.’  Your first one, that I hadn’t read the chapter, was wrong.  I had read it.  Your second one, that, after all, I had read the chapter while you were in the house, was also wrong.  I had read it by the side of the brook, an hour ago.”

Burns’s laughter spoke his enjoyment as heartily as if he were not the one cornered.  But his amusement ended in triumph, after all, though to this he discreetly did not give voice.  Since he had met Miss Charlotte Ruston in the woods Dr. John Leaver had not given himself to the study of any other man’s ideas.

CHAPTER XI

AFTER DINNER

“Charlotte Chase Ruston, I want you to come over to a little dinner to-night.  Just a few people, and as informal as dinners on hot August evenings should be.  Afterward we’ll spend the time on the porch.”

“Thank you, Len.  Whom are you going to have?  I want to prepare my mind for what is likely to happen.”

Mrs. Burns mentioned her guests.  “I’ve arranged them with special reference to Dr. Leaver,” she explained.  “I think it will do him good, just now, to have to exert himself a little bit.  He seems well enough, but absolutely uninterested in things or people,—­except the children.  He spends hours with them.  I’m going to put you next him, if I may.”

“Please don’t.  I particularly want the chance to talk with Mr. Arthur Chester about something I’ve found he can tell me.  We never can get time for it, and this will be just the chance.  Give Miss Mathewson to Dr. Leaver, and put some pretty girl on his other side.”

“I will, if you prefer, of course,” Ellen agreed promptly.  She had observed that, although she had taken pains to have them meet, Dr. Leaver and Miss Ruston seemed to be in the habit of quietly avoiding each other.  But she was not the woman to ask her friend’s confidence, since it was not voluntarily given.  She could only wonder why two people from the same world, apparently so well suited to each other, should be so averse to spending even a few moments together.