"It's to be remembered, Miss Holbrook, that he came first; and I am quite satisfied that your father sought him here before you and your aunt came to Annandale. It seems to me the equity lies with your uncle—the creek as a hiding-place belongs to him by right of discovery."
She smiled ready agreement to this, and I felt that she had come to win support for some plan of her own. She had never been more amiable; certainly she had never been lovelier.
"You are quite right. We had all of us better go and leave him in peace. What is it he does there—runs a ferry or manages a boat-house?"
"He is a canoe-maker," I said dryly, "with more than a local reputation."
Her tone changed at once.
"I'm glad; I'm very glad he has escaped from his old ways; for all our sakes," she added, with a little sigh. "And poor Rosalind! You may not know that he has a daughter. She is about a year younger than I. She must have had a sad time of it. I was named for her mother and she for mine. If you should meet her, Mr. Donovan, I wish you would tell her how sorry I am not to be able to see her. But Aunt Pat must not know that Uncle Arthur is here. I think she has tried to forget him, and her troubles with my father have effaced everything else. I hope you will manage that, for me; that Aunt Pat shall not know that Uncle Arthur and Rosalind are here. It could only distress her. It would be opening a book that she believes closed forever."
Her solicitude for her aunt's peace of mind, spoken with eyes averted and in a low tone, lacked nothing.
"I have seen your cousin," I said. "I saw her, in fact, this morning."
"Rosalind? Then you can tell me whether—whether I am really so like her as they used to think!"
"You are rather like!" I replied lightly. "But I shall not attempt to tell you how. It would not do—it would involve particulars that might prove embarrassing. There are times when even I find discretion better than frankness."