“Well, if you’re not sea-sick,” he assented, “there are not many pleasanter things in life.”

She suggested, “I suppose I’m not well enough to be sea-sick.”  Then she seemed to become aware of something provisional in his attendance, and she said, “You mustn’t stay on my account.  I can get down when I want to.”

“Do let me stay,” he entreated, “unless you’d really rather not,” and as there was no chair immediately attainable, he crouched on the deck beside hers.

“It makes me think,” she said, and he perceived that she meant the sea, “of the cold-white, heavy plunging foam in ‘The Dream of Fair Women.’  The words always seemed drenched!”

“Ah, Tennyson, yes,” said Breckon, with a disposition to smile at the simple-heartedness of the literary allusion.  “Do young ladies read poetry much in Ohio?”

“I don’t believe they do,” she answered.  “Do they anywhere?”

“That’s one of the things I should like to know.  Is Tennyson your favorite poet?”

“I don’t believe I have any,” said Ellen.  “I used to like Whither, and Emerson; aid Longfellow, too.”

“Used to!  Don’t you now?”

“I don’t read them so much now,” and she made a pause, behind which he fancied her secret lurked.  But he shrank from knowing it if he might.

“You’re all great readers in your family,” he suggested, as a polite diversion.

“Lottie isn’t,” she answered, dreamily.  “She hates it.”

“Ah, I referred more particularly to the others,” said Breckon, and he began to laugh, and then checked himself.  “Your mother, and the judge —­and your brother—­”

“Boyne reads about insects,” she admitted.

“He told me of his collection of cocoons.  He seems to be afraid it has suffered in his absence.”

“I’m afraid it has,” said Ellen, and then remained silent.

“There!” the young man broke out, pointing seaward.  “That’s rather a fine one.  Doesn’t that realize your idea of something mountains high?  Unless your mountains are very high in Ohio!”

“It is grand.  And the gulf between!  But we haven’t any in our part.  It’s all level.  Do you believe the tenth wave is larger than the rest?”

“Why, the difficulty is to know which the tenth wave is, or when to begin counting.”

“Yes,” said the girl, and she added, vaguely:  “I suppose it’s like everything else in that.  We have to make-believe before we can believe anything.”

“Something like an hypothesis certainly seems necessary,” Breckon assented, with a smile for the gravity of their discourse.  “We shouldn’t have the atomic theory without it.”  She did not say anything, and he decided that the atomic theory was beyond the range of her reading.  He tried to be more concrete.  “We have to make-believe in ourselves before we can believe, don’t we?  And then we sometimes find we are wrong!” He laughed, but she asked, with tragical seriousness: