"I wish to speak to you for a few minutes—to tell you what you may have guessed about us—my father and me."
"Yes; if you like; but only to help you if I can. It is not necessary for you to tell me anything."
She turned and led the way across the daisy field. She walked swiftly, holding back her skirts from the crowding flowers, traversed the garden of Red Gate, and continued down to the house-boat.
"We can be quiet here," she said, throwing open the door. "My father is at Tippecanoe village, shipping one of his canoes. We are early risers, you see!"
The little sitting-room adjoining the shop was calm and cool, and the ripple of the creek was only an emphasis of the prevailing rural quiet. She sat down by the table in a red-cushioned wicker chair and folded her hands in her lap and smiled a little as she saw me regarding her fixedly. I suppose I had expected to find her clad in saffron robes or in doublet and hose, but the very crispness of her white piqué spoke delightfully of present times and manners. My glance rested on the emerald ring; then I looked into her eyes again.
"You see I am really very different," she smiled. "I'm not the same person at all!"
"No; it's wonderful—wonderful!" And I still stared.
She grew grave again.
"I have important things to say to you, but it's just as well for you to see me in the broadest of daylight, so that"—she pondered a moment, as though to be sure of expressing herself clearly—"so that when you see Helen Holbrook in an hour or so in that pretty garden by the lake you will understand that it was not really Rosalind after all that—that—amused you!"
"But the daylight is not helping that idea. You are marvelously alike, and yet—" I floundered miserably in my uncertainty.