“Do you mean that seriously?” said Elizabeth, looking a little disturbed.

“I mean it half seriously,” said he laughing, getting up to push the boat to shore, which had swung a little off.

“But nobody likes, or wants, self-imposed discipline,” said Elizabeth.

“This isn’t self-imposed —­ I impose it,” said he throwing the rope round a branch of the tree.  “I don’t mean anything that need make you look so,” he added as he came back to his place.

Elizabeth looked up and her brow cleared.

“I dare say you are right,” she said.  “I will do just as you please.”

“Stop a minute,” said he gently taking her hand —­ “What do you ‘dare say’ I am right about?”

“This —­ or anything,” Elizabeth said, her eye wavering between the water and the shore.

“I don’t want you to think that.”

“But how am I going to help it?”

He smiled a little and looked grave too.

“I am going to give you a lesson to study.”

“Well? —­” said Elizabeth with quick pleasure; and she watched, very like a child, while Winthrop sought in his pocket and brought out an old letter, tore off a piece of the back and wrote on his knee with a pencil.

Then he gave it to her.

But it was the precept, —­

‘Little children, keep yourselves from idols.’

Elizabeth’s face changed, and her eyes lifted themselves not up again.  The colour rose, and spread, and deepened, and her head only bent lower down over the paper.  That thrust was with a barbed weapon.  And there was a profound hush, and a bended head and a pained brow, till a hand came gently between her eyes and the paper and occupied the fingers that held it.  It was the same hand that her fancy had once seen full of character —­ she saw it again now; her thoughts made a spring hack to that time and then to this.  She looked up.

It was a look to see.  There was a witching mingling of the frank, the childlike, and the womanly, in her troubled face; frankness that would not deny the truth that her monitor seemed to have read, a childlike simplicity of shame that he should have divined it, and a womanly self-respect that owned it had nothing to be ashamed of.  These were not all the feelings that were at work, nor that shewed their working; and it was a face of brilliant expression that Elizabeth lifted to her companion.  In the cheeks the blood spoke brightly; in the eyes, fire; there was more than one tear there, too; and the curve of the lips was unbent with a little tremulous play.  Winthrop must have been a man of self-command to have stood it; but he looked apparently no more concerned than if old Karen had lifted up her face at him.

“Do you know,” she said, and the moved line of the lips might plainly be seen, —­ “you are making it the more hard for me to learn your lesson, even in the very giving it me?”

“What shall I do?”