"No, I will not forget; but you must try not to cherish hard feeling."
"Oh, I don't say it's his fault. Mebbe it's hers."
"Perhaps it's nobody's, and perhaps there's no harm done after all,—at any rate, none that can't be undone."
"Yes, there is," Leonard answered gloomily. "The past can't never come back, and things won't never be the same."
"Oh, cheer up!" Winifred answered more hopefully. "Your going away is the best thing under the circumstances, and I'll do what I can for you; but I wish it were anything else."
"Thank you, marm, and good-bye!" With another shy duck, Leonard let himself down over the rocks and sculled out into the strip of rippling moonlight which stretched across the bay.
The moonlight fell also upon Winifred Anstice's face as she stood looking after him, and showed a pathetic little quiver about the mouth. An instant later, she dashed the back of her hand across her eyes, and exclaimed, half aloud, "It's too bad; I've no patience with him."
"What a clear night it is!" said Flint, stepping out from the shadows.
Winifred started a little. "I thought you were sitting by the fire," she said rather abruptly.
"Indeed," Flint answered. It was one of [Pg 166] his peculiarities never to be drawn on to the explanations to which most people are driven by the mere necessity of saying something. After all, he had as good a right to the place where he was as Miss Anstice herself. Miss Anstice perhaps was thinking the same thought, for she made no response, only stood twisting and untwisting a bit of lawn handkerchief which bade fair to be worn out before it reached home. At length, with the air of one nerving herself to a difficult task, she turned about and faced Flint. Lifting her clear gray eyes full to his, she began hesitatingly:—