"I have known many cases. Is your father good to you?" he asked, abruptly.
"Sick or well, with money or without, he is the kindest father in the world. Save in one way, it is always for me he thinks."
Her hand lay on the log. It was small and white, and she was very beautiful. Frank had seldom resisted temptation. This one he did not even try to resist, and he placed his hand over hers.
"Katrine," he said, "I am not a particularly good man, but the gods have willed that we meet—meet in strange moods and a strange way. I am a better man to-night than I have ever been in my life. It's the music, maybe, or the fringed gentian, or the whippoorwills." There was love-making in every tone of his voice. "Whatever it is, it makes me want to help you. May I? Will you trust me?"
She turned her hand upward, as a child might have done, to clasp his, looking him full in the eyes as she did so.
"Utterly," she said.
"I have not always been considered trustworthy," he explained, lightly.
"People may not have understood you." There was a sweet explaining in her voice.
"Which may have been, on the whole, fortunate for me," he answered, with a curious smile.
"Don't," she said—"don't talk of yourself like that. I know you are good, good, good!"