“So discouraging,” she said again.

A silence fell....  Antonia seemed thinking deeply.

“Doubts don’t help you,” she said suddenly; “how can you get any good from doubts?  The thing is to win victories.”

“Victories?” said Shelton.  “I ’d rather understand than conquer!”

He had risen to his feet, and grasped stunted branch, canting the boat towards the bank.

“How can you let things slide like that, Dick?  It’s like Ferrand.”

“Have you such a bad opinion of him, then?” asked Shelton.  He felt on the verge of some, discovery.

She buried her chin deeper in her hands.

“I liked him at first,” she said; “I thought that he was different.  I thought he couldn’t really be—­”

“Really be what?”

Antonia did not answer.

“I don’t know,” she said at last.  “I can’t explain.  I thought—­”

Shelton still stood, holding to the branch, and the oscillation of the boat freed an infinity of tiny ripples.

“You thought—­what?” he said.

He ought to have seen her face grow younger, more childish, even timid.  She said in a voice smooth, round, and young: 

“You know, Dick, I do think we ought to try.  I know I don’t try half hard enough.  It does n’t do any good to think; when you think, everything seems so mixed, as if there were nothing to lay hold of.  I do so hate to feel like that.  It is n’t as if we didn’t know what’s right.  Sometimes I think, and think, and it ’s all no good, only a waste of time, and you feel at the end as if you had been doing wrong.”

Shelton frowned.

“What has n’t been through fire’s no good,” he said; and, letting go the branch, sat down.  Freed from restraint, the boat edged out towards the current.  “But what about Ferrand?”

“I lay awake last night wondering what makes you like him so.  He’s so bitter; he makes me feel unhappy.  He never seems content with anything.  And he despises”—­her face hardened—­“I mean, he hates us all!”

“So should I if I were he,” said Shelton.

The boat was drifting on, and gleams of sunlight chased across their faces.  Antonia spoke again.

“He seems to be always looking at dark things, or else he seems as if—­as if he could—­enjoy himself too much.  I thought—­I thought at first,” she stammered, “that we could do him good.”

“Do him good!  Ha, ha!”

A startled rat went swimming for its life against the stream; and Shelton saw that he had done a dreadful thing:  he had let Antonia with a jerk into a secret not hitherto admitted even by himself—­the secret that her eyes were not his eyes, her way of seeing things not his nor ever would be.  He quickly muffled up his laughter.  Antonia had dropped her gaze; her face regained its languor, but the bosom of her dress was heaving.  Shelton watched her, racking his brains to find excuses for that fatal laugh; none could he find.  It was a little piece of truth.  He paddled slowly on, close to the bank, in the long silence of the river.