“It will make it reality.  But you don’t mean it?”

“Yes; why not?”

“I don’t know.  But I could n’t have dreamt of smoking in your presence.  And we take the liberty to dream very strange things.”

“Yes,” she said, “it’s shocking what things we do dream of people.  But am I so forbidding?” she asked, a little sadly.

“Not now,” said Libby.  He got out a pouch of tobacco and some cigarette papers, and putting the tiller under his arm, he made himself a cigarette.

“You seem interested,” he said, as he lifted his eyes from his work, on which he found her intent, and struck his fusee.

“I was admiring your skill,” she answered.

“Do you think it was worth a voyage to South America?”

“I shouldn’t have thought the voyage was necessary.”

“Oh, perhaps you think you can do it,” he said, handing her the tobacco and papers.  She took them and made a cigarette.  “It took me a whole day to learn to make bad ones, and this, is beautiful.  But I will never smoke it.  I will keep this always.”

“You had better smoke it, if you want more,” she said.

“Will you make some more?  I can’t smoke the first one!”

“Then smoke the last,” she said, offering him the things back.

“No, go on.  I’ll smoke it.”

She lent herself to the idle humor of the time, and went on making cigarettes till there were no more papers.  From time to time she looked up from this labor, and scanned the beautiful bay, which they had almost wholly to themselves.  They passed a collier lagging in the deep channel, and signalling for a pilot to take her up to the town.  A yacht, trim and swift, cut across their course; the ladies on board waved a salutation with their handkerchiefs, and Libby responded.

“Do you know them?” asked Grace.

“No!” he laughed.  “But ladies like to take these liberties at a safe distance.”

“Yes, that’s a specimen of woman’s daring,” she said, with a self-scornful curl of the lip, which presently softened into a wistful smile.  “How lovely it all is!” she sighed.

“Yes, there’s nothing better in all the world than a sail.  It is all the world while it lasts.  A boat’s like your own fireside for snugness.”

A dreamier light came into her eye, which wandered, with a turn of the head giving him the tender curve of her cheek, over the levels of the bay, roughened everywhere by the breeze, but yellowish green in the channels and dark with the thick growth of eel-grass in the shallows; then she lifted her face to the pale blue heavens in an effort that slanted towards him the soft round of her chin, and showed her full throat.

“This is the kind of afternoon,” she said, still looking at the sky, “that you think will never end.”

“I wish it would n’t,” he answered.

She lowered her eyes to his, and asked:  “Do you have times when you are sorry that you ever tried to do anything—­when it seems foolish to have tried?”