"Why not?" I blurted. "What have I done?"
She hesitated, then looked at me squarely.
"You've made my absurd young father," she said, "think that he is no longer young."
I lost just a moment in admiration. There wasn't one girl in a hundred who would have come out with it like that. Then I seized my chance.
"Why, it's perfectly idiotic," I cried. "Here's a man so big he's a giant beside me, so full of some queer magnetic force that on the way up here in the boat he made me forget that I was there. I forgot that you were there," I threw in, and I caught just the sign of a gleam in her eyes. "No longer young?" I continued. "That man will be young when you and I are blinking in our dull old age! He's the biggest man I ever met! And I want to know him, I want to know how he thinks and feels, I want that more than anything else! And now you come between us!"
"Are you real?" asked Eleanore. I looked back unflinchingly.
"Just you try me," I retorted.
"No," she replied with a quiet smile.
She said good-by to me that night.