“Why, I suppose that’s his boat, out there, now.”  Mrs. Maynard pointed to a little craft just coming to anchor inside the reef.  “He said he wanted me to take a sail with him, this morning; and he said he would come up and ask you, too.  I do hope you’ll go, Grace.  It’s just as calm; and he always has a man with him to help sail the boat, so there is n’t the least danger.”  Grace looked at her in silent sorrow, and Mrs. Maynard went on with sympathetic seriousness:  “Oh! there’s one thing I want to ask you about, Grace:  I don’t like to have any concealments from you.”  Grace did not speak, but she permitted Mrs. Maynard to proceed:  “Barlow recommended it, and he’s lived here a great while.  His brother took it, and he had the regular old New England consumption.  I thought I shouldn’t like to try it without your knowing it.”

“Try it?  What are you talking about, Louise?”

“Why, whiskey with white-pine chips in it.”

Grace rose, and moved towards the door, with the things dropping from her lap.  One of these was a spool, that rolled down the steps and out upon the sandy road.  She turned to pursue it, and recovered it at the cost of dropping her scissors and thimble out of opposite sides of her skirt, which she had gathered up apronwise to hold her work.  When she rose from the complicated difficulty, in which Mrs. Maynard had amiably lent her aid, she confronted Mr. Libby, who was coming towards them from the cliff.  She gave him a stiff nod, and attempted to move away; but in turning round and about she had spun herself into the folds of a stout linen thread escaping from its spool.  These gyves not only bound her skirts but involved her feet in an extraordinary mesh, which tightened at the first step and brought her to a standstill.

Mrs. Maynard began to laugh and cough, as Mr. Libby came to her friend’s help.  He got the spool in his hand, and walked around her in the endeavor to free her; but in vain.  She extended him the scissors with the stern passivity of a fate.  “Cut it,” she commanded, and Mr. Libby knelt before her and obeyed.  “Thanks,” she said, taking back the scissors; and now she sat down again, and began deliberately to put up her work in her handkerchief.

“I ’ll go out and get my things.  I won’t be gone half a minute, Mr. Libby,” said Mrs. Maynard, with her first breath, as she vanished indoors.

Mr. Libby leaned against the post lately occupied by the factotum in his talk with Mrs. Maynard, and looked down at Grace as she bent over her work.  If he wished to speak to her, and was wavering as to the appropriate style of address for a handsome girl, who was at once a young lady and a physician, she spared him the agony of a decision by looking up at him suddenly.

“I hope,” he faltered, “that you feel like a sail, this morning?  Did Mrs. Maynard—­”

“I shall have to excuse myself,” answered Grace, with a conscience against saying she was sorry.  “I am a very bad sailor.”