“Well, so am I, for that matter,” said Mr. Libby.  “But it’s smooth as a pond, to-day.”

Grace made no direct response, and he grew visibly uncomfortable under the cold abstraction of the gaze with which she seemed to look through him.  “Mrs. Maynard tells me you came over with her from Europe.”

“Oh yes!” cried the young man, the light of pleasant recollection kindling in his gay eyes.  “We had a good time.  Maynard was along:  he’s a first-rate fellow.  I wish he were here.”

“Yes,” said Grace, “I wish so, too.”  She did not know what to make of this frankness of the young man’s, and she did not know whether to consider him very depraved or very innocent.  In her question she continued to stare at him, without being aware of the embarrassment to which she was putting him.

“I heard of Mrs. Maynard’s being here, and I thought I should find him, too.  I came over yesterday to get him to go into the woods with us.”

Grace decided that this was mere effrontery.  “It is a pity that he is not here,” she said; and though it ought to have been possible for her to go on and rebuke the young fellow for bestowing upon Mrs. Maynard the comradeship intended for her husband, it was not so.  She could only look severely at him, and trust that he might conceive the intention which she could not express.  She rebelled against the convention and against her own weakness, which would not let her boldly interfere in what she believed a wrong; she had defied society, in the mass, but here, with this man, whom as an atom of the mass she would have despised, she was powerless.

“Have you ever seen him?” Libby asked, perhaps clinging to Maynard because he was a topic of conversation in default of which there might be nothing to say.

“No,” answered Grace.

“He ’s funny.  He’s got lots of that Western humor, and he tells a story better than any man I ever saw.  There was one story of his”—­

“I have no sense of humor,” interrupted Grace impatiently.  “Mr. Libby,” she broke out, “I ’m sorry that you’ve asked Mrs. Maynard to take a sail with you.  The sea air”—­she reddened with the shame of not being able to proceed without this wretched subterfuge—­“won’t do her any good.”

“Then,” said the young man, “you must n’t let her go.”

“I don’t choose to forbid her,” Grace began.

“I beg your pardon,” he broke in.  “I’ll be back in a moment.”

He turned, and ran to the edge of the cliff, over which he vanished, and he did not reappear till Mrs. Maynard had rejoined Grace on the piazza.

“I hope you won’t mind its being a little rough, Mrs. Maynard,” he said, breathing quickly.  “Adams thinks we’re going to have it pretty fresh before we get back.”

“Indeed, I don’t want to go, then!” cried Mrs. Maynard, in petulant disappointment, letting her wraps fall upon a chair.