"Why!" she said again, faintly, "you don't mean—? you're not—?"
He laughed, opening his hands in a gesture of amused and hopeless assent. "I am," he said, and flung the tiny fagot out on the water.
Fred dropped her chin on her fists and watched the twigs dancing off over the waves. They were both silent; then she said, frowning, and pausing a little between her words as if trying to take in their full meaning:—"You are in love with me."
"Has it just struck you?"
"How could it strike me—that you would care for a girl like me!"
"Considering your intelligence, you are astonishingly obtuse, at times. I couldn't care for any other kind of girl. Or for any girl, except you!"
"Miss Eliza said something that made me wonder if.... But I couldn't believe it. I thought that sort of thing was over for you. I never dreamed of—"
"Oh, well! don't dream of it now. Of course it doesn't make a particle of difference. I didn't mean to speak of it; it sort of broke loose," he ended, in rueful confession.
Fred was silent.
Arthur Weston, hiding the tremor that was tingling all through him, began to talk easily, of anything—Zip, the weather, whether Miss Carter could be induced to reconsider her annual resignation; "It would be very hard on Mrs. Payton to lose her," he said.