“I can’t see what good that would do,” she said, with some relenting toward a smile, in which he instantly prepared himself to bask.

“But you will when I’ve done it.  Now listen!”

“Please don’t go on.”  She cut him short with a return to her severity, which he would not recognise.

“Well, perhaps I’d better not,” he consented.  “It’s rather a long resolution, and I don’t know that I’ve committed it perfectly yet.  But I do assure you that if you were disgusted last night, you were not the only one.  I was immensely disgusted myself; and why I wanted you to tell me so, was because when I have a strong pressure brought to bear I can brace up, and do almost anything,” he said, dropping into earnest.  Then he rose lightly again, and added, “You have no idea how unpleasant it is to lie awake all night throwing dust in the eyes of an accusing conscience.”

“It must have been, if you didn’t succeed,” said Alice drily.

“Yes, that’s it—­that’s just the point.  If I’d succeeded, I should be all right, don’t you see.  But it was a difficult case.”  She turned her face away, but he saw the smile on her cheek, and he laughed as if this were what he had been trying to make her do.  “I got beaten.  I had to give up, and own it.  I had to say that I had thrown my chance away, and I had better take myself off.”  He looked at her with a real anxiety in his gay eyes.

“The boat goes just after lunch, I believe,” she said indifferently.

“Oh yes, I shall have time to get lunch before I go,” he said, with bitterness.  “But lunch isn’t the only thing; it isn’t even the main thing, Miss Pasmer.”

“No?” She hardened her heart.

He waited for her to say something more, and then he went on.  “The question is whether there’s time to undo last night, abolish it, erase it from the calendar of recorded time—­sponge it out, in short—­and get back to yesterday afternoon.”  She made no reply to this.  “Don’t you think it was a very pleasant picnic, Miss Pasmer?” he asked, with pensive respectfulness.

“Very,” she answered drily.

He cast a glance at the woods that bordered the road on either side.  “That weird forest—­I shall never forget it.”

“No; it was something to remember,” she said.

“And the blueberry patch?  We mustn’t forget the blueberry patch.”

“There were a great many blueberries.”

She walked on, and he said, “And that bridge—­you don’t have that feeling of having been here before?”

“No.”

“Am I walking too fast for you, Miss Pasmer?”

“No; I like to walk fast.”

“But wouldn’t you like to sit down?  On this wayside log, for example?” He pointed it out with his stick.  “It seems to invite repose, and I know you must be tired.”

“I’m not tired.”