"I am coming to see your father to-morrow," he said. "It will be a hard battle, but it must be decided at once."
He helped them to land, and they walked in silence to the house. At the doorway, in which Eva had disappeared, Rose took Allan's outstretched hand in both of hers, and drawing it close, laid her weary, wet little face down upon it. The sound of voices and laughter came up from the beach, and she hastily released herself and fled to her room.
The next afternoon Eva Macleod, with an air of considerable importance, tapped at the door of her father's apartment. "Papa," she said, with that fondness for a choice diction observable in carefully reared young ladies at the beginning of their teens, "may I have a private conversation with you?"
"Why, certainly, my dear! A little talk, I suppose, you mean."
Without heeding this undignified interruption, Miss Eva gave her parent a very accurate report of the dramatic scene in the boat the evening before, of which she had been an interested auditor.
"Of course," she added, in conscientious defence, "I didn't want them to suppose I was sleeping, but if I had opened my eyes it would have been very embarrassing for us all."
"Humph!" said her father. "Does Rose know that you were awake?"
"No, I have not broached the topic to her," replied Eva, with an affectation of maturer speech.
"Humph!" said the gentleman again; a quizzical glance at his younger daughter breaking for a moment through the gloom with which he was meditating the fate of the elder one. "Well, I am glad you 'broached' it to me; I shall—"
"Papa," interrupted Eva, with bated breath, glancing down from the window at which she stood, "there is Allan now."