"Larry," she said, "do not be sorry for Helen if pity is all you have for her."
I laughed and seized her hands.
"Miss Pat, I could not feel pity for any one so skilled with the sword as she! It would be gratuitous! She put up a splendid fight, and it's to her credit that she stood by her father and resented my interference, as she had every right to. She was not really against you, Miss Pat; it merely happened that you were in the way when she struck at me with the foil, don't you see?"
"Not just that way, Larry,"—and she continued to gaze at me with a sweet distress in her eyes; then, "Rosalind is very different," she added.
"I have observed it! The ways in which they are utterly unlike are remarkable; but I mustn't keep Gillespie waiting. Good-by for a little while!" And some foreboding told me that sorrow had not yet done with her.
Gillespie shouted impatiently as I ran toward him at the boat-house.
"It's the Stiletto," he called, pointing to where the sloop lay, midway of the lake. "She's in a bad way."
"The storm blew her out," I suggested, but the sight of the boat, listing badly as though water-logged, struck me ominously.
"We'd better pick her up," he said; and he was already dropping one of the canoes into the water. We paddled swiftly toward the sloop. The lake was still fretful from the storm's lashing, but the sky was without fleck or flaw. The earliest of the little steamers was crossing from the village, her whistle echoing and re-echoing round the lake.
"The sloop's about done for," said Gillespie over his shoulder; and we drove our blades deeper. The Stiletto was floating stern-on and rolling loggily, but retaining still, I thought, something of the sinister air that she had worn on her strange business through those summer days.